


all that's known in history and science

by wendlaa



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (But not until later), (Coming soon to a fic near you), Bottom Draco Malfoy, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Good Narcissa Black Malfoy, M/M, Married Life, Memory Loss, Not a sequel I just like to have fun, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Draco Malfoy, Slow Burn, Teacher Harry, Top Harry Potter, Yasmin (she's back y'all), set in 2005
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-01 19:16:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20377015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wendlaa/pseuds/wendlaa
Summary: “That’s not my life,” Draco says firmly. “It’s not. It’s someone else’s. Someone else lived this life for eight years, but it certainly wasn’t me. I don’t have a husband. I couldn’t... And if by some strange twist in reality I did, it certainly wouldn’t be… him.”“Him,” Yasmin repeats. “Mr. Potter.”“Yes,” Draco says firmly. “We’re not… I’m not…”There’s an uncomfortable pause where all the things Draco isn’t hover in the silence.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and thank you for coming to my second full-length fic. Please be patient with me and also please leave lots of loving feedback. 
> 
> I want to thank Julia for their tireless love, attention to detail, and eight-am editing skills. Also thanks to Liddy and Bob and Phoenix for being my cheerleaders!! 
> 
> And thank you to my new fiancé for saying "yes". :)

I.

The first thing Draco is aware of is the pain behind his eyes. It pulses, a low, harsh hum that seems to drive into the back of his skull. Swaths of light try their best to burn through his lids, so he screws his eyes shut even tighter. His throat feels tight and dry, his mouth cottony. When he tries to move his limbs, he finds them to be heavy and aching. He can hear the scratch of cloth against the bed, can feel the rub of fabric on his skin.

It takes him several long, quiet moments of laying with himself to dredge up the memories of where he had been, where he might be now, what had happened, why his body ached-- it all came flooding back with a density that did nothing for his splitting headache. 

_ The Battle. Bodies. Blood. Spells. His classmates, strewn over rubble like ragdolls. He did that. He allowed it. It was him. His own fear crawling up his throat like bile. _ His body begins shaking without his permission and he can feel that same bile, real this time. He wrenches his body upward so that he can throw himself over the edge of the bed-- eyes cracking open, St. Mungo’s familiar teal wall-tiling filling his vision --and wretch up whatever is left in his stomach. It’s nothing much at all, as it turns out, and it splashes thick and disgusting on the floor. It burns his nose.

“Oh!” A soft voice. He feels hands on his shoulders, drawing him to lay back on the bed. “Mr. Malfoy, try to relax. Here, drink this.”

Small, brown hands hold a potion vile to his lips. He swallows, throat feeling like cut glass. The potion tastes just as vile and he does his best to keep it down. It settles his stomach, though, and for a moment he finds himself capable of breathing evenly. The Healer standing over his bed frowns, her brows pulling together in concern. She lays the back of her hand against his forehead. Her skin is cool to the touch, which means he must be burning up. He tries to speak but his throat aches. 

“Shh, just relax for a moment,” the Healer says. Her voice is soft. Draco’s eyes drop to the name stitched into her robes:  _ Yasmin _ . “The potion ought to settle your stomach. We’ll give you something for the pain in a minute.”

The pain. Settle his stomach. Draco’s stomach twists with snakes and guilt and roiling failure and humiliation. Why is he even  _ here _ ? Shouldn’t he have been left to die like all the other… the other… Another wave of nausea forces Draco’s thoughts to an unpleasant halt. He breathes unevenly, fingers curling into the itchy fabric of the hospital bed cloth. He can hear the Healer tsk, can hear the scratch of a quill against paper. His eyes are squeezed shut again, his knuckles feeling bruised with how tight his grip has turned. Don’t they know who he is? What he’s done? What he deserves?

“Your family should be here any minute,” the Healer, Yasmin, says. When Draco pries open his eyes again, she’s returned to his beside with another potion vial. “For the pain. Easy does it, there you go.”

The potion works. It goes down thick and unpleasant, but he can feel the pain in his limbs, in his head, in his throat, slowly start to recede. He still feels tender, but perhaps less as if he were about to fall entirely apart. He can keep his eyes open, at least. There’s a window just behind his bed where the bright light is coming from. It’s a private room, small and cozy and just a little bit crowded with left-behind chairs and extra hospital blankets and pillows piled on them. 

“You’re a lucky man, Mr. Malfoy,” Yasmin says as she bustles around the small room, moving the chairs, pulling the blinds, pulling her wand and running a diagnostic spell or two to check his vitals. The magic prickles his skin, making him aware of the sweat clinging to his collarbone, the back of his neck. 

“My parents,” Draco croaks. His voice is rusty from disuse. He can’t begin to fathom how long he’s been here. “They’re coming?”

“Your mum was here,” Yasmin agrees. “And all the rest.”

_ The rest? _ Draco can’t get the words out so he doesn’t bother. He eases himself up a little on his pillows so he isn’t so supine. 

“Do you remember anything that happened before you were brought here?” Yasmin asks. She’s got her quill and her parchment attached to a clipboard. Fear makes the edges of his limbs go cold. Draco remembers clearly the ash-faces of those around him, the energy of the last stand, the vibrancy of what he knew, what they all knew, to be the  _ final battle _ . Swallowing around the thick feeling in his throat, Draco shakes his head. Lies. It would do him no good-- it was over, whatever had happened. It was over and it didn’t matter what side had come out on top. He doesn’t even  _ know _ , he realizes. He would be dead regardless. Thrown into Azkaban or killed, outright, wand to his throat for his acts of resistance. 

They ought to have just let him die among the rubble where he belonged. 

“That’s alright,” Yasmin says. Her smile is so soft and easy. He doesn’t understand how she can look at him like this. “You were--”

But whatever it was Yasmin was about to tell him about himself is cut off by the rattle of the door, the inward swing of it on its hinges and  _ bodies _ spilling into the room. The first person he sees is Mother, her face stricken, white, her hair falling loose from a complicated plait at the back of her head. She throws herself over him and Draco’s body moves without his approval, arms coming up to cling to her. He presses his face to her neck while she clings to him. Her face is wet against his cheek. She strokes his face, his hair-- which he feels, now, hangs long and sweaty around his shoulders.

Draco is still trying to understand his hair when Mother pulls back and he sees the rest of the people who have crowded around his bed. It takes him embarrassingly long to place their faces because they’re  _ different _ . They’re so different. He wouldn’t have recognized Harry Potter if it hadn’t been for the grotesque scar zig-zagging its way down half his face. He is otherwise entirely changed-- hair longer, pulled back off his face in a knot at the back of his head, cheeks and jaw obscured by black facial hair. Potter comes around to his other side on the bed, opposite mother.

Hermione Granger floats, buoyant as she is with a rotund stomach beneath her knitted sweater. Two Weasleys, Ronald and the sister, crowd in at the end of his bed. He would not recognize Ronald, either, if not for the hair. Ginerva Weasley looks paler than usual, her face gone white as a sheet beneath her freckles. The last to crowd around his bed is the only other person he would have expected, maybe-- Blaise Zabini, broader in the shoulders than Draco could ever remember seeing him. They all look so  _ old _ . When Draco focuses on Mother, she too looks aged by years, her soft hands knobby at the joints. 

“Okay, okay, give him a little space,” Yasmin says. “He’s having some trouble with his memory.”

“Idiot,” Ginevra says with affection. It startles Draco out of his silence.

“What--” Draco tries, croaks, swallows, tries again. “What are you-- why are you…”

“Potion experiment went bad, love,” Potter--  _ Potter _ says, reaching a hand to touch Draco’s cheek with the backs of his knuckles. Draco nearly pulls a muscle ripping himself away from the range of his touch.  _ Love? _ The confusion swings him into another rush of dizziness and nausea. Mother’s hands steady him. Each face his eyes flicker to, in turn, have the same dawning confusion knitting their brows, pulling their lips down. Granger and the Weasley brother exchange furtive glances. 

Potter’s hand hovers in the air. Draco watches his gaze warily meet Mother’s over his head. 

“Draco?” Mother murmurs. She finds his hand, squeezes it. Draco tightens his grip. 

“Why are they here?” Draco finally croaks out. “What-- why…?”

“You said he was having memory trouble?” Potter asks, looking over his shoulder to Healer Yasmin. But even she’s beginning to look alarmed. 

“He didn’t remember what happened before he got here,” Yasmin explains. Her voice sounds uncertain. Draco turns his face away, presses it against Mother’s arm. She squeezes around him, pressing one cool hand to his temple. There’s too many bodies in the room, too many faces, too many sounds of accelerated, shocked breathing. Draco would rather sink back into unconsciousness than have to sit through whatever this is, whatever is happening. It’s hard to focus, hard to decide where he’s been misplaced. 

“What  _ does _ he remember?” Blaise asks, the frown audibly blanketing his voice. “Draco? What do you remember?”

Draco lifts his face from Mother’s arm. Struggles to focus. It feels like his heart might beat entirely out of his chest. “You know,” he says, feeling vicious. The words are rough from his throat, but biting. “You  _ know _ .”

How could they not? How could they not  _ know _ ? It couldn’t have been that long. Days, maybe. A week at most. He couldn’t have been asleep that long. 

“We don’t,” Granger says, her voice soft and kind in a way that seems foreign to him. Her small hand reaches over the end of the bed and touches his ankle through the blankets. Draco rips it away, curling his knees up to his chest. The hurt look that dashes across her face feels victorious. 

“Draco!” Mother sounds appalled. He pulls himself away from her, too. It’s the last thing he wants, but he doesn’t  _ fucking understand _ . And maybe that’s the worst part of all of this. Being so certain and yet, not knowing. Feeling like there’s something that would make all of this fall into place and not being able to reach it. Everyone looking at him with a mix of confusion and pity. Mother looking horrified. Potter looking-- Draco doesn’t focus on Potter’s face.  _ Can’t _ focus on Potter’s face. No potion in the world would settle his stomach if he were to keep looking at him. 

“Okay,” Yasmin demands, stepping in. “Okay. Let’s… let’s give him a moment. Can we have the room?”

“What?” Potter says, voice tight, hard. “What? No. I’m not-- no, if there’s something wrong with him, I get to stay. I get to know.”

“Harry.” Hermione’s voice. Draco pushes his hands up over his face, fingertips getting tangled in his hair. It falls around his shoulders, now. It’s so  _ long _ , why is it  _ long _ ? Draco pulls his hands away from his face, trailing his fingers through his hair, pulling it forward to see it fall in lifeless hanks around his shoulders. 

“Just for a minute,” Yasmin urges, low and quiet. Draco pushes the heels of his palms against his eyes. Draws his knees up closer. His chest feels tighter and tighter. 

“Okay, come on,” Blaise murmurs. “Come on. Gin. Harry.  _ Harry _ .”

The shuffle of feet. Mother’s weight leaving the bed, the sound of her stifled sob. Ginevra calls her  _ Cissy _ and tells her  _ It’s going to be okay, Cissy _ . 

When the door closes, the room feels so empty, so quiet, that the silence seems oppressive now. Yasmin’s voice nearly echoes as she eases to sit on the edge of the bed next to him. 

“Hey,” she murmurs. Her hand is soft on his arm, guiding his hands away from his eyes. Draco looks at her, scans over the almond shape of her eyes, the upturn of her nose. When she smiles, it crinkles the corners of her eyes. “It’s alright. Can you tell me what year it is, Mr. Malfoy?”

Five minutes ago he would have been very sure of his answer. “Nineteen-ninety-eight,” Draco says, cautious. The upward turn of his voice at the end makes it sound like a question. 

“That’s okay,” Yasmin assures quickly, despite the way she reaches for her quill and clipboard. “You had a bit of an accident. It’s natural that you’re a little confused. It’s the thirteenth of May, two-thousand and five.” 

_ 2005 _ . The number seems astronomical. It seems  _ impossible _ . Not only that it should be 2005, but that he should be  _ alive _ to see 2005. Draco’s eyes track back and forth, unseeing, as he struggles to do a bit of simple math. “That would make me twenty-five,” Draco says, voice tight. “I… I’m not… I’m seventeen. Barely. Barely seventeen.”

“That would make you twenty-five, yes,” Yasmin says, ignoring his other assertion. “You were brought in by your husband--”

“By my  _ who _ ?” Draco balks. “By my… my? I don’t-- I’m not… I’m  _ seventeen _ .”

“You were brought in by your husband, Mr. Potter, after he found you in your potions lab, unresponsive. It seems like something went wrong. According to your husband--”

Draco feels like he might pass out. He scrabbles his hands, grasping at Yasmin’s arm, her shoulders. “Please stop,” he begs. “Stop saying that. I’m going to be sick.”

“Do you need another potion?” Yasmin asks. She covers his hands with her own. “Try to breathe through it.”

Draco allows her to coach him through several deep breaths, in through his nose and out through his mouth. His stomach doesn’t feel any less unsettled, but he isn’t sure that it’s something a potion will be able to help him with. His mind struggles to even comprehend what Healer Yasmin has said to him. His-- Potter-- his… It feels like his brain physically recoils from the words. 

“Okay?” Yasmin asks. Wanting to shake his head, Draco nods instead. 

“Mr. Potter found you unresponsive in your potions lab. He said it looked like something had gone wrong. A bad reaction, maybe.” Yasmin notedly does not call Potter his...  _ that _ . “You were unstable for a few days. You might have some trouble with migraines in the next few weeks. We’ve got potions for that. They’ll come and go but it should wear off. The… erm, the memory problems, though…”

Draco swallows. He refuses to believe that his memory is wrong. It can’t be. It must be, somewhat. But it can’t  _ possibly be _ .

“We’ll keep you here another night,” Yasmin says, squeezing Draco’s hand between her own. “Monitor you. See if any of your memories start coming back. I can have one of the staff Legilimens come in and see if they can’t poke around in there.”

More nausea. “No,” Draco says, his voice firm. “No. Absolutely not.”

He meets Yasmin’s eyes. His mind feels clear, clearer than it has been since waking up. She nods, just a minute movement of her chin. “Alright,” she agrees. “But we’ll still keep you another night, just to be safe. Your memories might come back in… five hours, five minutes.”

“Five days,” Draco supplies, dully. “Five years.”

“Not likely,” Yasmin assures, a smile warming up her whole face. He likes her. He doesn’t know much, but he knows that. “Shall I let your family back in?”

“They’re not my family,” Draco insists. “Just… just my mum. She can come in.”

Yasmin’s eyes seem sad when she smiles next, squeezing his hand. “Sure thing, love.”  
  


II.

Exhaustion takes Draco out again only an hour into visiting with Mother. He doesn’t want to hear about the other people hovering outside the room, so they try to talk around it. It’s difficult. Draco learns that Mother has been in Nice, France, since the end of the war, since after the trials. She was acquitted of all charges for her instrumental role in the war. Draco doesn’t want to think about his own trial, what might have been said, what sentence might have come down on him. He asks her not to tell him, and Mother agrees-- though, reluctantly. 

There seems to be so much she wants to say but doesn’t. Draco can’t get over the differences in her face. The new lines. The soft wisps of grey in her hair, darker than the natural blond. He wants to know where his Mother went, who this woman trying to replace her is, but every time she looks at him it’s like she might start sobbing all over again, so he says nothing. Eventually, exhaustion claims him and he lets it happen. Sleep comes as a relief, calming the churning his stomach and the near-constant anxiety about who else is waiting in the hallway, desperate to get back into his room. 

Draco feels muddled as he comes in and out of sleep. Mother is there a few times. Others, it’s Yasmin, checking his vitals with a quick spell, offering him water. He sleeps through most of the day and awakens during evening. Yasmin is gone, another Healer having taken her place. This one brings him supper, asks if he’s in any pain, then leaves him to his own devices. He’s grateful. He has nothing new to say. There are no new memories. He picks at his food, uncomfortable in the stomach. 

The nausea wins out. Draco sets the tray on the bedside table and sinks down in his bed, staring at the ceiling. He can’t stop thinking about-- about what Yasmin said, about… Potter. It makes everything inside of him revolt. He tries to think of life paths that might lead him to  _ this _ . But no matter what he comes up with, he can’t imagine himself in the situation he’s in now. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no logical progression between the war and here. Not even with eight years in-between.

_ Eight years _ . That thought almost sends his stomach into another tailspin. Draco scrubs his hands over his face. He sits up, slowly, feeling the aches in his body. The door to the small hospital ensuite, really just a toilet and a sink and nothing else, hangs open. Touching his hair, Draco eases himself to his feet. His legs feel weak and standing makes him dizzy, but he shuffles his way to the bathroom. A low candlelight burns along the wall when he enters, casting a gentle glow for him to peer into the mirror with. 

He looks  _ sick _ . Draco frowns, watching himself frown right back in his reflection. His skin is sallow, his white-blond hair lank and long. There are dark circles under his eyes, making him look like he lost a bar fight. And he’s different. Older. Less pointy, maybe. His face having aged into all of those things that had been his insecurities in his youth. Draco turns his chin this way and that, observing himself. Standing in front of the mirror is making him exhausted and dizzy again, though. He tears himself away from the mirror and stumbles back through into the hospital room.

Undue anxiety drives Draco to pull open the door into the hallway. He’s half-expecting to see Potter and his cohorts sitting outside, waiting for him to let them back in. But there’s no one. He can hear a Healer down the hall talking low to another patient. Draco eases the door closed and drags himself back to bed, flopping onto the mattress, exhausted. 

Twenty-five. He doesn’t feel twenty-five. He feels seventeen and stupid and terrified. He curls onto his side, facing the door with ever-increasing anxiety. He wishes Mother were here, still. He wishes she could stay the night. He doesn’t know where his wand is. He can’t even cast a  _ tempus _ charm to see how many more hours he has to wait until Yasmin returns for the morning shift. 

The night drags on. Draco sleeps very little. He gets up a few times and shuffles around his room. Checks the hall. A passing Healer corrals him back to the bed the fifth time he peers into the corridor, tells him not to worry about it, he needs rest, try to get some more sleep. 

One of the migraines Yasmin mentioned comes just after sunrise. It makes him nearly kick his feet with how bad it aches, burning through his skull, roiling his stomach with nausea. He drags the blankets over his head and bites his fist to stop himself from sobbing. Eventually, a Healer comes around for morning rounds. It isn’t Yasmin. He’s given a potion to manage the pain. The pain ebbs away, slowly, until it’s just another dull ache behind his eyes.

“How are we feeling this morning?” Yasmin asks first thing when she finally does come around, just past eight in the morning (Draco asks). “Any memories?”

Sitting up, Draco shakes his head. “No,” he says, voice tight. “Nothing new. I got a potion for a migraine.”

Yasmin frowns. She waves her wand to run a diagnostic spell. Clicks her tongue. “You’ll just have to give it some more time,” she says, sounding apologetic. “But being around familiar things, familiar people… it’ll help.”

Familiar. The word means nothing to him now. The last familiar thing he remembers is the castle he spent his childhood in crumbling around him. He doesn’t tell her that. Draco twists his hands together in his lap, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to drown out the last hum of pain from the migraine. 

“Mr. Potter will be by in a few hours,” Yasmin says, her voice careful. Cautious. “He owled. He’d like to take you home and we have no other reason to keep you. The accident didn’t cause any lasting damage. The migraines should subside in a few weeks with the potions…”

“No,” Draco says, throaty. “No. I want… Can I go home with my mum? Can you… can I owl her? Floo her?”

“You can go home with anyone you want,” Yasmin assures. “If you’d rather be released to Mrs. Malfoy…”

“Yes,” Draco says firmly. If he had to leave here with anyone, it would be Mother. There’s nothing, nothing on this green earth, that might convince him to go home with Potter. Yasmin was, very pointedly, not calling Potter anything other than  _ Mr. Potter _ . 

Yasmin nods. “We can arrange that. Whatever you need, Draco.”

It’s arranged. In three hours time, Mother is waiting outside the door. He doesn’t know where Potter is, but he isn’t here. She’s brought him a change of clothes. Draco still feels a little exhausted and dizzy, but he’s glad to be leaving the cramped hospital room. Yasmin smiles and squeezes his shoulders.

“You’re scheduled for a check up in a week,” she tells him. “Just to see how you’re feeling. Hopefully some of those memories will have started showing back up.”

Draco swallows. “Right,” he says. “Of course.”

The day outside is chill and drizzly. He and Mother walk, slowly, carefully, with measured steps, to the nearest apparation point. He clings to her arm as she Side-Alongs them to … Draco is expecting the Manor, but when his head stops spinning, he finds himself standing in the entrance hall of a small flat. Outside, he can hear the drizzle of rain. The flat is modest, with a cozy sitting room and a cramped kitchen. A single bedroom that overlooks a miniscule, overgrown garden in the back. Mother guides him to sit on a couch in the small sitting room, pulls out her wand to light the fireplace. 

“Where is this?” Draco asks. It isn’t home and that’s all he knows. 

Mother’s hands seem to be restlessly moving, fingers curling together, squeezing, tugging, twisting. “It’s mine,” she says, softly. “I come visit often. It’s where I stay when I do.”

“It’s small. What about the Manor?” Where is  _ home _ ? Why aren’t they going  _ home _ ?

Mother looks over at him with a pinched expression. “It… the Manor is gone, love.”

“What do you mean gone?” Draco demands. He feels itchy all over. There’s so much information that everyone knows about him, about this life, about the world around him. He gets the distinct feeling that Mother is frustrated that he doesn’t know, that he has to ask. 

Mother sighs, heavy, her shoulders seeming to slump with a weight that Draco can’t possibly comprehend. She comes to the couch with him, sitting with her hands in her lap, fingers laced tight together. “The Manor’s been gone for a while, my darling,” she says. Mother lifts one hand and covers his own. Draco turns his wrist and grips her fingers. 

“The Manor was taken by the Ministry when Lucius was sentenced to Azkaban,” Mother says. The words feel distant. Like perhaps they should hurt worse than they do. The Manor is gone and Father is gone and it feels like he can’t feel it at all. He squeezes Mother’s hand tighter, dropping his gaze to his lap. Mother keeps speaking, her voice soft, a gentle murmur at his shoulder.

“It was the stronghold for the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” Mother explains. “There wasn’t… there wasn’t any way the ministry would let it keep standing. We were allowed a handful of heirlooms and portraits but the rest was seized or destroyed.”

_ We _ . Draco lived through this. He tries to imagine himself as he is now, going into the Manor, picking out what would be best to take with them. Only allowed what they can carry. And the rest? He can’t even fathom what it is they would have taken. His childhood had been filled with beautiful, fragile heirlooms strewn about the Manor. Portraits that watched him with hawk-eyes as he played on the stairwell, in the drawing room, chasing the garden cat in through the kitchen’s open back doors. And now it’s gone-- mostly, almost all of it. The collection of vases from Great Aunt Beatrice. Grandfather Abraxas’ pocket watch. Was that among the kept? 

Draco can’t imagine anything being kept in this tiny little flat. Perhaps Mother took them with her to Nice. 

“How about some tea?” Mother asks, finally. 

Swallowing, Draco nods. “Tea,” he agrees. 

Mother bustles into the kitchen, leaving him to the quiet of the sitting room. The clattering sound of a kettle on the stove. Water pouring. Draco pushes his hands against his face and exhales softly. He can feel the thrum of pain behind his eyes. He would almost welcome a migraine-- it would mean finding a quiet, dark place to curl up and forget the rest of the world. But even digging the heels of his palms against his sockets doesn’t urge forward much more than a pulse at his temple. 

Draco drops his hands as Mother returns with a mug of tea. He takes it, letting the ceramic warm his palms. 

“What do you… what do you remember?” Mother asks. Draco swallows, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. He doesn’t want to say. But her voice sounds so aching, so desperate for information. 

Draco clears his throat. “The… the last stand, at… at school. When he… When You-Know-Who…”

Mother squeezes his shoulder. “That was eight years ago,” she says. “You’ve… you’ve moved on. We all have.”

“Then why doesn’t it feel like it?” Draco croaks. “I woke up and all I could think was  _ how am I alive _ ?”

“Darling,” Mother says. It’s loaded. There are a million things she wants to say, he can feel it in the way the endearment rolls off her tongue. 

He doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t want to know. His life had gone on without him and now he’s here-- not seventeen but not twenty-five, confused, frustrated, maybe terrified. He can’t stop hearing Healer Yasmin’s voice in his ear:  _ Your husband _ . Can’t stop seeing Potter’s hand, soft, approaching from his peripheral in the hospital room. Familiar. Like touching him is so familiar, like he’s allowed. 

“Please,” Draco says, voice tight. “I can’t. I don’t…”

“Harry wants to come by,” Mother says.  _ Harry _ . She says his name easily, like she’s had a fair bit of practice getting it out of her mouth. The sound of it hits the ear wrong and Draco hunches his shoulders against his jaw. Mother presses on, speaking gently over his obvious discomfort.

“The Healer said it would be good for you to be around familiar people,” Mother insists. Familiar! As if Potter were anything other than a reminder of all his moral failings. A reminder that Potter was able to do what he couldn’t-- walked a path that Draco had turned his back on. How had they even come into each other's lives again? Had eight years changed so much about him, about Potter, that they were-- that this was…? His mind struggles to comprehend what he knows, what everyone seems to know. He keeps thinking around it, refusing to focus on Potter, on who he was. 

“I don’t want to see him,” Draco deadpans. “He isn’t familiar. He’s-- I can’t. I don’t want to.”

He doesn’t look at Mother but he can practically feel her staring at him. He looks down at his mug, the tea slowly going tepid. “I need to lay down,” he says, finally. He hasn’t taken a sip of tea.

“Of course,” Mother murmurs. Her hands flutter in his peripheral before simply falling still. She stands, leading him through the small flat to the bedroom. The bed is turned down, fresh sheets. The window looking out over the garden in the back of the flat lets in grey, rainy light, making the room feel dark and cozy. Mother hovers. Draco wishes that this could all just go away. 

Clothes have been brought from somewhere-- soft pajamas, nice slacks, button ups. They’re piled in a suitcase on a chair in the corner of the room. They’re his, clearly, but he doesn’t remember ever having owned clothes so casual, so borderline-Muggle. Mother leaves him alone, gently closing the door. Draco hovers by the end of the bed, looking around the dim room. There are pictures on the bedside table-- Mother and himself, smiling, waving. He doesn’t know where they are, when it was taken. His hair is shorter in the picture. 

There are others, too, on the bookshelf. These ones are more startling. A picture of himself and Potter, looking over their shoulders from some unnamed balcony. It seems more recent, his hair in a plait, Potter’s face scruffy with the dark facial hair. They keep looking back out over the scenery, then over their shoulder at whoever is behind the camera. Potter’s hand comes up and presses behind his shoulder blades. 

Draco turns the picture around so it’s facing the back of the bookshelf. 

The others have a combination of himself and Mother, smiling in the sun, standing in front of monuments, having tea at an outside table at a cafe. All of these moments, immortalized in photographs, things he can’t remember. There isn’t a single picture of Father.

His stomach twists in hunger, but he’s already sulked his way into the bedroom. Draco changes into the soft pajamas that have been laid out for him, pulling his hair out from underneath the collar of the shirt. He doesn’t know what to do with it all.

Crawling into bed is a relief. He pulls the blankets up over his head. They smell fresh and clean. It’s easy for him to burrow his nose in the fabric, squeeze his eyes shut and let the silence of the room wash over him. Beyond the closed door, Draco can hear Mother moving around the flat. The sounds of the kitchen. Of her soft footsteps. The sounds of the flat are contained, muted. It isn’t the same as the Manor. The Manor used to echo, the sounds slipping from one end of his home to the other. He misses it. He misses his home. 

Draco rolls, restless. Sleep doesn’t come. 

III.

Mother tip-toes around him. The days are achingly long and Draco knows it’s his fault. He doesn’t want to hear about the life he’s missing and Mother runs out of things to say to him. Migraines come frequently now, just as Yasmin said they would. The potion for the pain knocks him out, leaves him taking long naps curled up on the couch or in Mother’s bed. His sleep schedule is so thrown off that he and Mother are awake at the same time for only a few hours in the morning and again in the evening. 

They don’t talk about real things. He can tell that it’s getting harder for Mother not to say what she wants to say. Draco isn’t even sure if it’s helping him. Certainly, all it seems to be doing is making him more and more aware of everything he doesn’t know, drawing his anxieties out. He allows only snippets of information: how long Father has been in Azkaban, what it’s like in Nice, where they went for vacation in some of the photographs. 

Three days after coming home from St. Mungos, Draco awakens mid-afternoon to the sound of voices on the other side of the bedroom door. One is Mother, the melody familiar but frustrated. The rhythm of them rise and fall, louder and then softer, furious. It’s difficult to make out the words. Draco lies there for a while, struggling to pick out the identity of the second voice. 

Rolling out of bed, Draco eases to the door and pulls it open a touch, leaning against the jamb. 

“He’s not ready,” Mother says, sounding exasperated. They’re in the kitchen. He can hear her fumbling with something, the clatter of dishes. “He doesn’t even want to hear about the trials. In his head he’s seventeen and the war just ended. He closes up every time I try to talk about his life, what it’s like now.”

The sound of Potter’s voice shakes Draco to his core when he says, “He’s my  _ husband _ ,” as if repeating it would make it any more true. The word makes him dizzy. Nausea. It makes him want to wretch, though he can’t pinpoint why. Something like fear, like terror, running up his spine, nipping at his heels. 

“And my  _ son _ ,” Mother scolds. Her voice softens again and Draco has to lean into the hall to catch her next words. “Darling, I am not  _ keeping _ him from you. You know that.”

Potter sighs. “I know.”

“He’ll be seeing the Healer again in four days,” Mother says. “And maybe by then his memories will have come back.”

“And if they don’t?” Potter, again. “You’re going to stay holed up in this flat with my husband for who knows how long? There’s only one bedroom. What about Sadie?”

_ Sadie _ ? Draco frowns, inching further out into the hall. 

“If I have to,” Mother says fiercely. It pulls something in the center of Draco’s chest. He wants to go to her, but the knowledge of Potter’s presence keeps him trapped in the hall. 

There’s a beat of silence before Potter puffs a laugh. “Cissy,” he says. The same way Ginevra had said  _ Cissy _ . All of these people, insinuated into his life, calling Mother by a nickname he had only ever heard Aunt Bellatrix use. Had never heard Father use. Draco takes another step in the hall and a floorboard creaks under his weight. The silence in the kitchen becomes purposeful now. 

“Darling?” Mother calls. Footsteps, more than just one pair. 

Mother comes around the corner of the kitchen and into the hall, followed closely by Potter. His unruly hair is pushed back off his face but loose, his face clean shaven now. It makes him look younger, closer to twenty-five than he looked in the hospital room. Mother looks stricken, nervous, but Potter is looking at him over her shoulder with an expression that feels unreadable. Draco sinks back towards the bedroom door. 

“How are you feeling?” Mother asks. 

“Fine,” Draco says, clipped. He lets his gaze drop. The flat, already small, feels immediately cramped with Potter there.

“Darling,” Mother murmurs-- not to him, to Potter, now. “Maybe it would be best…”

Potter exhales harshly. The sound of it seems pulled deep out of his chest. Draco refuses to look, finds himself staring pointedly at a spot on the opposite wall. “Right,” Potter says, out of Draco’s periphery. “Yeah.”

Mother and Potter both retreat from the hall. Only then does Draco allow his gaze to lift, to follow their backs as they disappear into the sitting room. A low murmur of voices. Mother saying, “I’ll owl you, darling,” and, “I know this is difficult.” Potter’s voice is too low to hear the response, but before long there’s the familiar snarl of the Floo powder hitting the fireplace, swallowing Potter up and whisking him away from here. Goodbye and good riddance!

Draco chases the silence that follows out into the sitting room. Mother stands in front of the fireplace, the green flames still licking in the embers, her hands gripping the mantle. Her shoulders are drawn taut, her head bowed. He can see the infinitesimally small tremors that ripple through her shoulders. A familiar pain starts to take root in Draco’s chest-- disappointing Mother, causing Mother distress, a childhood terror that would cling to him, daily. It seems he has not shaken it, does not think he ever could. 

Drawing a deep breath, Draco steps further into the sitting room, allows the pad of his bare feet on the floor to announce his presence. Mother moves only enough to straighten her back, loosen her shoulders. “Who’s Sadie?” Draco decides to ask. If he cannot hear about his own life, perhaps he could hear about Mother’s. 

Mother turns to face him, her lips drawn into a thin smile. “Come have breakfast,” she urges, wrapping her thin arms around his shoulders and drawing him with her to the kitchen. He sits at the small round table while Mother commands eggs and toast with her wand-- skills he never knew her to have in his childhood --to cook themselves upon the strove. When the food is presented on a plate and settled on the table, Draco finds himself to be ravenous. His stomach, so used to the daily nausea from the migraines, had been picking at toast and filled with tea. 

It takes all of Draco’s pure-blood upbringing not to swallow the eggs in two bites. He picks and nibbles at them, polite as he’s been taught. 

“Sadie,” Draco prompts, once Mother seats herself across from him, passing a mug of tea across the table top. “Potter mentioned… I heard, that is… who is Sadie?”

Mother’s smile goes soft, secret, her eyes turning downward. Draco watches a pretty flush come to her cheeks. “Sadie is a friend,” she says, which sounds like a warm, delighted, bold-faced lie. 

The lie seems familiar, though, in an abstract way. Like she’s told it to him before, like they’ve had this exact conversation. It rings almost-true in the back of his mind, but when he reaches for the memory there’s nothing. 

“A friend,” Draco repeats.

“A lot has changed in eight years,” Mother says, lifting her gaze. She’s smiling, looking loose and soft. “I met her in Nice. She’s a Charms advisor for the French Ministry. We…” Mother’s gaze flickers. Draco wonders what she’s searching for in his face-- disapproval, disgust? He searches for it in himself, tries to find the gut-instinct that tells him  _ No, no, no _ when Yasmin mentioned his  _ husband _ . It isn’t there. He cannot turn it outward, onto his mother. 

“You,” Draco prompts.

“We.” Mother smiles, seems to flutter in her seat. “You attended the ceremony in November.”

Ceremony. Draco feels a little off kilter. Father is gone and Mother has moved on so thoroughly, so spectacularly, that  _ Sadie _ the Charms advisor for the French Ministry has taken his place. 

“What was it like?” Draco asks, feeling dizzy. 

Mother warms and brightens when she talks about it. A quiet, sea-side wedding. Only family had attended. Family, of course, being Draco and Potter and Aunt Andromeda and young Edward Tonks and the youngest Weasley siblings and Granger. Family. Draco had never had a large family, before. Mummy and Father and Auntie Bella and that was it. Grandfather died when he was too young to remember, Grandmother even before that. He’d never known Aunt Andromeda, nor any of his cousins as they stretched out further and further from the Black family name. And the Malfoy side, well, forget about it-- one son each for generations, no Aunties or Uncles or Cousins to spare.

And so there was a ceremony. There are pictures, Mother says, but they’re all back in Nice. It was beautiful, according to Mother. Draco can feel his heart thud, dull, echoey, in the center of his chest. He can’t pinpoint why. 

Sadie can’t take time off work to be here, Draco surmises from Mother’s nervous, jittery rambling. So she came on her own. Potter’s words seem to echo in his head-- that Mother is here, missing Sadie, holed up in this miniscule flat with him, because of him. Never having felt particularly brave before, Draco wonders if it would not be better to bite the bullet and return… home. Wherever his home might be. He suspected with Potter. The thought is so jarring and unsettling that he brushes it off and allows the guilt of his selfishness to gnaw at him. 

He wants to stay here, with Mummy, and that’s that.

Talking about Sadie seems to loosen Mother up some, though. She hedges towards other topics, things about his post-war life that Draco isn’t sure that he’s ready to know. 

He lives in a Wizarding district of London. Draco assumes with Potter, though Mother very carefully never says so. He’s going for his Potion’s Mastery and was in the middle of doing course-work when the accident happened.

“Twenty-five seems a bit late to be trying for my Mastery,” Draco says, unnerved.

“You weren’t sure what you wanted to do,” Mother explains, her voice etching the sound of her smile. “You had a bit of trouble finding someone to take you under as an apprentice, even after your acquittal--”

Ah. So he had been acquitted. Draco isn’t sure how to feel about it-- a clean slate, certainly, but it didn’t seem to have worked in his favor. Mother looks a little chastened that she’d let the information slip, but forges on all the same.

“You gave Cursebreaking a try,” Mother says, nearly grinning at the memory, if such an expression were not unfitting of a woman of her standing. “It went a bit poorly. No fault of your own, of course, darling. Then there was your brief flirtation with law. You wanted to be a barrister! And then solicitor. You would have left a fair few Wizards penniless, I’m sure.” 

Mother barrels through his failed careers with something like amused joy, counting them off on her fingers. “You were twenty-three, I think, when you finally landed on getting your potions Mastery. You want to open up a specialty Apothecary. Of course you do,  _ of course _ .” Mother laughs, not unkind.

Mother tells him all these things that feel true for someone else. For a Draco who is twenty-five, eight years over the war. Not him. Not him, barely seventeen, still reeling from the idea that he had faced no criminal charges for the things that he’s done. The orders he followed. The people he hurt. The deaths he undoubtedly caused. No one seems to be talking about that. He can’t decide if they’re dancing around it or if it’s all been swept under the rug after eight long years. 

“You’re quite close to finishing,” Mother says. “And… and certainly you’ll get your memories back any day now. Before the week is out, I bet. Everything will make sense, then.”

“Right,” Draco agrees, voice hollow. The idea of his memories coming back feels less and less likely the more he learns about himself. Eight years. Gone, in a single miscalculation of potion ingredients. And if they were gone forever… Draco can see the same uncertainty echoed back at him in Mother’s face, her lips gone tight and thin.

“They’ll come back,” Mother assures.

The words are for herself as much as they are for him .

  
  
IV.

At the end of the week, Draco meets with Yasmin in a small exam room at St. Mungo’s. Mother waits outside, nervous and tetchy. It’s been a long week and he can tell with every passing day that Mother’s anxiety about his memories is getting worse. Holed up in the flat, there’s nothing for him to do but read the books on the bookshelf and stare out onto the street and explore the tiny, overgrown garden. He’s taken to pulling up the weeds strangling some of the flower beds up against the fence, if only to have something to do. 

“How are you feeling?” Yasmin asks, looking over an arrangement of papers detailing Draco’s treatment.

“Tired, all the time,” Draco admits. “Migraines every day now.”

Yasmin hums, nods, makes a note of it. “Those should start getting better soon,” she assures. “How about your memories?”

Draco shakes his head, hands twisting together. “Nothing,” he says. “Mother has tried telling me things, but nothing seems to help.”

Yasmin frowns over her papers before settling them in her lap. “You really ought to think about easing back into your regular life,” she says, tone careful. Draco knows what she means without her having to say it: he should move back in with Potter. He should accept the impossible: that he lives with Potter, that they are… somehow, they have… Draco shakes his head, pushing his hands through his hair and flipping it over to one side. He ought to cut it all off, seeing as he has no idea how to deal with it all. He can’t even do a proper braid. It’s long and getting in the way and really, he ought to just slice it off.

“That’s not my life,” Draco says firmly. “It’s not. It’s someone else’s. Someone else lived this life for eight years, but it certainly wasn’t me. I don’t have a husband. I  _ couldn’t _ ... And if by some strange twist in reality I did, it certainly wouldn’t be… him.” 

“Him,” Yasmin repeats. “Mr. Potter.”

“Yes,” Draco says firmly. “We’re not…  _ I’m _ not…”

There’s an uncomfortable pause where all the things Draco  _ isn’t _ hover in the silence. 

“We can still have a Legilimens look,” Yasmin offers. “See how far down the memories are.”

The thought of someone poking around in his head is so terrible that Draco physically recoils, pressing himself back in his chair as hard as possible. “I would prefer not to,” he says, voice gone thick. Yasmin’s expression is soft and gooey. Her hand is warm on his wrist as she reaches out to touch him, giving him a squeeze. 

“It’s going to be difficult,” Yasmin says, pulling her chair closer. Draco can smell her shampoo. She takes his hand in her own, pressing their palms together. Draco squeezes back, looking down and watching the contrast of her skin against his own. “But you  _ did _ live this life.”

Draco exhales shakily, squeezing Yasmin’s hand until his knuckles hurt. “I don’t know what to say to any of them,” Draco admits in a quiet murmur. “Not even Mother.”

“It’ll come when it comes,” Yasmin says. And as nonsensical as it sounds, as ridiculous, it settles something in Draco’s stomach.  _ It’ll come when it comes _ . Draco nods, suddenly finding himself laughing, the sound caught in the back of his throat. 

The rest of the meeting involves patiently sitting through Yasmin’s diagnostic spells before being told that, other than the memory loss, he’s recovering perfectly fine from the accident. Yasmin gives him another supply of potions for the migraines and then he’s free to go. Upon returning home, the flat seems even smaller after venturing back out into the world. It’s a perfectly fine place to vacation when visiting London, but Draco is certain it wasn’t meant to be lived in long term. 

It was easy to want to give into the selfish temptation of staying here with Mother-- she was, after all, his  _ mother _ , and he her  _ son _ . But in the days that followed, Draco found himself caught up in watching the way Mother stared with such longing at the Floo, as if hoping to get a fire-call from some mysterious Charm’s advisor. She hadn’t called Sadie, not once since Draco’s stay began. And why should he care, really? He didn’t ask for any of this. He woke up with a broken brain. Through no fault of his own! Through only the fault of someone else who had been piloting his body without his consent for the last eight years. Why shouldn’t he get to luxuriate, alone, unbothered by the outside world? 

Potter is keeping contact. That much he knows. He watches Mother hastily tuck away letters and send off quick notes with an eagle owl that doesn’t reside in the flat. 

_ Potter _ . Thinking about him is difficult-- two parts embarrassing, two parts infuriating. Wholly unsettling. How dare he, really? Hadn’t Draco made it increasingly clear that he wanted nothing to do with him? That this false idea he had about him, about what they were to one another, wouldn’t be tolerated? Oh, surely Mother is telling him to just wait it out, that any day his memories would come back to him and it would all be just fine.

It wouldn’t! It certainly and most ardently  _ would not _ be just fine. Draco could not imagine any scenario, any memory, that might bridge the gap of helpless, impotent anger he felt. 

He doesn’t want to know how. He doesn’t want to know why. He wants, simply, to no longer be a hostage to a life he didn’t choose. 

“Darling,” Mother says in that loaded, careful way of hers in the days following his visit with Yasmin. It’s early evening and he’s just come out on the other side of a migraine, exhausted and tetchy as he lays curled up on the couch. Mother has brought him tea. He can hear the scrape of the ceramic on the glass top of the coffee table. Her hand is soft when it falls to brush his hair off his forehead. 

“I think you ought to talk with someone,” Mother suggests. Her voice carries just over his head to the left of the couch as she takes root on the settee. 

“I’ve already spoken with the Healer,” Draco murmurs into the crook of his arm, deliberately obtuse. 

“I was thinking someone else,” Mother says patiently. “Perhaps Blaise Zabini might make it easier to…” 

A beat of silence. Draco lifts his head from his arm and peers over at her, eyes still sensitive in the low light of the sitting room. “Easier to,” he deadpans.

Mother smiles, but it’s tight around her eyes. Mother’s smiles always seem to be tight these days. Or hiding something. Draco can’t quite pinpoint which, but he knows it has to do with him and this flat and the confining walls and the hours ticking away, one day rolling into the next. Talking to someone, even to Blaise, would be making an effort. An effort he wasn’t sure he was ready to make in the first place. Why should he have to… The thought cuts off, miserably, because he knows why.

“Darling,” Mother murmurs. She stands and moves, only to crouch elegantly by his head, her hand stroking his hair back. Her thumb ghosts along the apple of his cheek. “You are  _ so _ very loved. Everyone is worried. They miss you.”

The words itch the inside of Draco’s ribs. He’s never known that to be true. Not in the way that Mother means it. He frowns, turning his face against her palm. She leans in, pressing her dry lips to his forehead.  _ Everyone _ . Draco thinks of the people in the hospital room: Granger with her pregnant belly, the Weasley siblings and Ginevra’s stricken, white face. And Blaise, who he could understand the most. But where did he fit into all of it? Who was he to each of them?  _ Loved _ , Mother said, with conviction that Draco could not muster.

“I don’t understand,” Draco says, finally, letting it spill from his lips. It comes out rough, tight in the back of his throat, half-unwilling and half compulsory. “How did I get here?”

Mother’s eyes turn sad. She drops her hands; Draco finds them with his own, squeezing. “Only you know that,” she says. 

“I  _ don’t _ !”

“You will.” Her expression looks drawn taut, as if she is doing her best to keep her patience with him. It’s familiar. The look of a mother. Draco wretches his hands from her own and turns his back to the room, curling up tight on the couch. He’s tired of this, tired of everyone expecting his memories to come back. He hasn’t got them, he doesn’t want them. 

In the end, it’s Sadie that forces Draco out of inaction. 

Two weeks since the accident has made the flat impossibly cramped. Draco has ripped all the weeds from the small back garden, read all of the most interesting books on the bookshelf, and exhausted what little information he can from Mother without treading into territory that he doesn’t want to know. Love him as she must, Draco can tell that Mother is growing tired. The migraines have subsided for the most part, leaving Draco with large swaths of his day no longer consumed by sleeping off a potion. 

Coming in from the back garden, Draco can hear the soft murmur of voices in the sitting room, the crackle of the Floo. Inching just on the other side of the doorway, Draco peers in. Mother is sat kneeling in front of the Floo. In the fireplace is the head and shoulders of a woman, dark skinned and handsome, her tight curls cropped close to her head. 

“I just don’t know what to do,” Mother murmurs. “He doesn’t want to know anything. I’m trying, Sadie, but…”

“I’d be petrified if I were him,” Sadie says. The insinuation flares up something rough and grouchy inside of him. “You can take as long as you need, darling.”

_ Darling _ . A new familial habit? Had Sadie picked it up from Mother, or Mother from Sadie? 

“I just miss you,” Mother murmurs. 

Feeling much the voyeur, Draco slinks back out into the garden, shame chasing him all the way.

That night, long after the Floo has gone silent, long after Mother has retired for the evening, long after Draco has sat, irritated, with his shame and guilt, he drafts a letter. 

> _ Potter, _
> 
> _ It is with great reluctance that I reach out to you. It has come to my attention that staying in London with me during my recovery is keeping Mother from her duties as a new wife back in Nice. I have been informed that my usual residence is in the Wizarding district of London. After I have suitably informed Mother of my intentions, I will be arriving by Floo this upcoming Sunday.  _
> 
> _ Do not mistake me. I have no memory of our acquaintanceship and have no desire to know more. I am returning to our shared place of residence because it is, for all intents and purposes, my home. _
> 
> _ That is all. _
> 
> _ Best. _
> 
> _ Draco Abraxas Malfoy. _

He writes the letter three times over and then carefully etches out his final copy onto some nice parchment paper he found in the desk in the sitting room. Mother doesn’t keep an owl, though, so he folds the letter up and tries to pretend that it’s mere existence isn’t the thing keeping him from settling down to sleep on the couch. He tosses and turns through most of the night, wishing at least he had a migraine to blame for it. 

In the morning, Draco drags himself awake, showers, dresses, and finds Mother in the kitchen nursing tea and staring out into the back garden. 

“I’ve got a letter to send,” he says, bravely. “And then I believe I should prepare to return… to where I live. Home, wherever that is.”

There’s a lot of weeping that goes into it all, all of it from Mother. She sends his letter off with the eagle owl that shows up with the daily checking-up from Potter. And then there’s weeping, Mother holding him in the kitchen and telling him, “I love you so much, my darling,” and pressing wet kisses to his temples and cheeks. Draco can tell there’s more to it, of course-- excitement, desire to return home, to get back to Nice, to see Sadie, to shepherd him off to someone else for a while. If Draco were not so bent on his martyrdom he might throw a tantrum over the whole display.

Potter’s reply comes quickly, just before lunch. Mother insists on walking down to the bakery around the corner for fresh treats. Draco is sitting in the kitchen, watching the garden out back, when the eagle owl returns once more, pecking at the glass of the window. Standing, Draco lets it in and carefully unties the letter from it’s ankle. The bird coos and rubs against his arm, pinching the fabric of his shirt lightly with its beak. 

The returning letter is short.

> _ Draco, _
> 
> _ Sunday. Sounds like a plan. _
> 
> _ I miss you. _
> 
> _ Love, _
> 
> _ Harry x _

“What is this?” Draco asks the bird, frustrated, furious, wanting to rip it to shreds. He shows the paper to the owl, who simply bites the corner and rips it off. “Absolutely,” he agrees, feeling all at once foolish and vindicated. 

Sunday comes quicker than he might have imagined.

The day is uncomfortably, unseasonably warm. The windows that overlook the street in the sitting room are open, letting in a short breeze. The whole house smells like fresh air, like springtime, like the onset of summer. Mother stands with him in front of the fireplace. Behind him, she hums soft and low. It’s a tune he doesn’t know. He’s been puttering about the flat for hours. Taking his time waking up, hogging the shower, insisting that he and Mother take breakfast out in the garden.

Then there was packing his clothes, which took little to no time at all. He had insisted on putting the books he’d borrowed back on the shelf and made a show of having misplaced one, finding it only after twenty minutes of poking around the sitting room. Finally, though, the time arrives. It’s just past eleven. He stands in front of the Floo with his heart racing, his stomach twisting, his brain buzzing through a million different scenarios as to what awaits him on the other side of the fireplace. 

“I don’t want to go,” Draco says, staring at the Floo, twisting the handle of his suitcase in his hands. 

Mother’s hands come up from behind, tucking in a loose strand of hair from the complicated plait she’d done in his hair for him that morning. “We don’t cancel plans last minute, darling,” she says warmly. “And I have a Porkey to catch back to Nice in two hours.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Draco begs. “I’ll come back to Nice with you.”

Mother’s hands squeeze his shoulders as she comes around to stand in front of him. Her smile is indulgent now, her well of patience restored with the knowledge that she would soon be on her way back home. It isn’t  _ fair _ and all Draco wants to do is protest it down to the very last second. Mother would stay, he knows. If he asked, sincerely. If he begged her to stay, to not make him leave, to let him retreat in cowardice. She would do it because she loves him. 

“Be brave, my darling,” Mother says, drawing him down, kissing his forehead. She smells like perfume. It itches his nose.

“I’m not at all,” Draco murmurs. “I’ve only ever been foolish.”

“Foolishness begets bravery,” Mother says. “You can do this.”

And he does.

The Floo powder trickles through his fingers before he throws the whole fistful down into the hearth and proclaims his destination, hoping his voice doesn’t warble too much. The green flames leap up, cool to the touch, wrapping themselves around him. His eyes squeeze shut as he rushes through the Floo network, pinched and rattled about until he finds his footing underneath him again.

The first thing he sees as he steps out of the fireplace is a sitting room decorated in light grey with yellow accents: the lampshade, the throw pillows on the settee, the rug in front of the hearth. The window to the left looks out over the street, the curtains drawn back to let in the early afternoon light. There’s a desk in the corner, piled with books and papers. His eyes follow the line of the furniture until they land on a figure in the doorway. Potter stands leaning against the jamb, his hair damp. He must have just gotten out of the shower.

There’s a moment of silence. Then, Potter pulls a wand from the back pocket of his trousers. He holds it out, handle facing Draco, as if trying to coax him the few metres across the sitting room floor. The wand is familiar in a way that kick starts his heart, has it thrumming in the back of his throat. The hawthorn wand. The last time he had seen it was in the drawing room at the manor. Potter had wrenched it away from him, had stolen it and disappeared before the Dark Lord had been able to come. 

It hadn’t occurred to Draco that he might get it back. Now, eight years after the inciting incident. The last wand he had used, at Hogwarts, at the battle, to throw spells, had been his mother’s. The wand feels monumental. It feels impossible. Draco feels his throat tightening as he steps out of the hearth, dropping his suitcase to the floor with a dull thud. 

“My wand,” Draco says.

“Yeah,” Potter agrees. As if it’s that easy. “I forgot to bring it to St. Mungo’s when… after.” Potter clears his throat, pushes his free hand against the back of his neck. 

Draco eyes him warily, taking enough steps only to be able to reach out and take his wand back. Having it back in his hand he can feel his magic curling up his arm, sinking into his skin, settling in the center of his chest. He had hardly noticed how desperately he missed having his wand in the last two weeks, stuck as he was with migraines and potions and sleeping the days away. Having it in his hands, now, though… Draco flips his wand over in his fingers before holding it firmly by the handle. He seems to have had his wand back for some time now, based on how blasé Potter had been upon returning it. The thought makes him want to turn back around into the Floo. So much of his life, so many milestones, just gone on without him.

“Thank you,” he says, clipped. He can feel Potter’s eyes on him and the silence seems cautious. Draco keeps his eyes down for as long as he can before having to give in and look Potter in the face. The expression he finds there is open like a book, hiding nothing. It reminds him of the way mother has been looking at him when she thinks he can’t see. Draco swallows around the tightness in his throat. 

“You want breakfast?” Potter asks, casual as anything. “I was just about to make some. French toast? Your favorite.”

_ Your favorite _ . The easy presumption with which Potter says it puts Draco’s teeth on edge. He doesn’t want to  _ do _ this. He doesn’t want to stay here and pretend that this sham of a life is something he would have ever wanted to live. He doesn’t want to make small talk with Potter over a breakfast of what would most certainly be shoddily made french toast, not his favorite, not by a long shot. 

“No,” Draco says, stiff and stilted. “I want to lay down. I’ve got migraines, you know.”

Potter’s brows hedge up under his messy fringe. “Right,” he says in a voice that sounds indulgent, like Mother has already told him that Draco’s migraines have all but abated. Draco wills his face not to flush. “Bedroom’s where it always is.”

Draco blinks heavily. “And that would be,” he deadpans. 

Potter steps forward, into his space, and then smoothly passes him to he grabs the suitcase. “Come on,” he says, touching Draco’s elbow as he passes him through the doorway and into the hall. It’s all Draco can do not to flinch. 

The bedroom, where it has always been, is down at the end of the hall. They pass by two rooms on the way. One looks like a study, the other is a bathroom. The last door is the bedroom. When Draco passes through the doorway, he’s struck by the lived-in feel of it. There’s a chair in the corner with piles of clothes and books, even more books set haphazardly on both bed-side tables, filled to the brim on the bookshelf. Potter grabs a pair of linen trousers off the end of the bed, which is still unmade from the night previous, and tosses them onto the laundry-book chair. 

“Sorry,” Potter says. “Haven’t really had time to clean up.”

Potter gives Draco a wide berth to circle back around to the doorway while Draco hovers at the end of the bed.

This is the room where someone who isn’t him falls asleep, nightly. Someone who isn’t him probably has a side of the bed he sleeps on. Someone who isn’t him has no qualms falling asleep with another person in the bed, feet bumping, knees touching, arms brushing. The thought makes him want to crawl into a hole and never come out. 

“So, I’ll just…” Potter steps back into the hall. He doesn’t look like he wants to leave. His hand hovers on the doorframe, fingers digging at the wood.

“Yes,” Draco agrees and closes the door firmly in his face. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your patience and all of your kind words! Everything is happening all the time but thankfully so is this fic. 
> 
> THANK YOU JULIA for sticking with me even when things got difficult. Thank you for your TIRELESS hours of beta-reading, editing, and helping me shape the tone of this story. You're amazing and I don't know what I would do without you!
> 
> Thank you Liddy and Bob for always being my cheerleaders. And thank you to my fiancée, for putting up with me. :)
> 
> Enjoy!

I.

The silence that echoes after the slam of the door isn’t as satisfying as Draco had hoped.

An in-depth look of the bedroom finds that many of the books must belong to Draco-- there’s tomes on different potion theories, post-education texts, histories, recipes… Nothing that Potter would find useful, certainly. Not with how poorly he’d been in potions in school. He returns the scattered books to the bookshelf, then folds the haphazard clothes. Feeling a little more comfortable, Draco explores the rest of the room at his leisure.

Drawing back the curtains, Draco finds that the bedroom window looks out over a well-kept backyard. He can see the edge of a porch, a little garden, a tree that casts shade over a small picnic table and garden seat. The grass is worn down into a path from the house to the picnic table, as if they make a habit of taking their lunch in the back garden.

Letting the curtain fall over the window again, Draco turns to look over the room. There’s a small desk with no chair. Inside the drawer, there’s an unorganized mess of papers with some version of his own handwriting. He rifles through them and finds incomprehensible notes about potions, ingredients, experiments, books that he hasn’t read.

He finds letters, too. Old ones, judging by the dates in the corner. They go back months, some years. Letters from Blaise about a wedding, from Ginevra Weasley about when he's going to meet up with her again for a game of one on one Quidditch. They don't seem particularly important, these letters-- nothing heart wrenching that he learns about himself. Rather, they just seem to have been swept up with all the other loose papers and shoved in a drawer. Draco scans them anxiously, trying to find something important about his life that he might have missed. All he seems to know is that he was present at Granger and Weasley’s wedding and that Blaise was furious about the color scheme. Returning them to the drawer, Draco follows the whims of his curiosity to the closet. 

The clothes that had been laid out for him at Mother’s house were strange and Muggle. What he finds in the large closet is not that much different. His lips turn down at the corners as he thumbs through shirts and trousers. He can see a clear divide between his own clothes and Potter’s. On what Draco can only assume is his side of the closet, he finds several button up shirts, tailored trousers, and expensive day-to-day robes. The other side of the closet is a mess of strange patterns, knitted sweaters, short-sleeve cotton shirts,  _ denim trousers _ . It's  _ Harry’s _ side of the closet. The implied domesticity of their life makes him want to rip everything off the hangers. 

With the closet explored, Draco leans his back against the closed door and stares around the room, taking it all in. In some other world, some other version of himself might find this room a reprieve. Comforting, even. To Draco, here and now, it makes him miss the heavy-handed silence and subsequent echo of the manor. In the quiet, Draco can hear the clatter of cooking in the kitchen. French toast.  _ Your favorite _ . Draco has no feelings about french toast either way, but it most certainly couldn’t be considered his favorite. But the sounds from the kitchen draw him out into the hall all the same. His lips press into a thin line as he hedges his way back down the corridor to the sitting room, where on the opposite side an open archway leads through the rest of the house-- a cozy dining room, and then through a second archway, an open kitchen. 

Draco follows the sounds of clatter. It is vaguely familiar. He chalks it up to remembering the sounds of mother in the kitchen in the small flat over the past two weeks. As he rounds the corner of the kitchen doorway, Draco can see Potter cooking-- dipping fat slabs of bread and egg wash and slapping them into a sizzling pan on the stove. It isn't woodburning, like the one at the Manor, the one in Mother’s flat. It leaves Draco a little dizzy at wondering how it works, but he snaps that curiosity behind a locked door for now. Somehow, he has come to live a half-Muggle life and he's aiming to blame Potter for it. 

Despite his silent entrance, Potter seems to sense him hovering. He throws a look over his shoulder that seems impossibly indulgent. “Your head feeling better?” He asks. The tone of his voice is foreign. Draco doesn't know how to categorize it. 

The frustration builds deep in his gut. He doesn't know how Potter can just sit here and look at him and make french toast as if any of this is normal. It isn't, not even a little. Draco's teeth clench, his skin prickling. Anger builds in his gut until he thinks he might burst with it. Someone else has been living his life and no one seems to care-- they're all just waiting for the stranger to come back again. Draco steps further into the kitchen, fists trembling, nails biting into the palms of his hands. 

“I’m not doing this,” Draco says once he's found his voice again. He feels much more himself, whoever that might be. Potter’s hand stills on the pan, his brows knitting together. 

“Doing what?” Potter turns the stove off, abandoning the breakfast in order to turn to face Draco more fully. His arms crossed, the muscles of his forearms in lean, sinewy bands under the dark brown of his skin. Frustration builds like steam under Draco’s skin. Potter  _ knows what _ , and he's being deliberately obtuse. 

“This,” Draco says firmly. “I'm not going to sit here and pretend this isn't some sham.”

“Sham,” Potter repeats. Carefully neutral. 

“We're not married,” Draco says. The words come out stilted, bitten, dragged out from behind his teeth. Even giving the notion credibility by addressing it is giving Draco something like hives. 

“No?” Potter prompts. 

“No,” Draco agrees, the sound dragging all of the air out of his lungs. In an instant he misses the quiet solitude of his mother's vacation flat. He misses the way his moods were unchallenged, his difficulties catered to, his strops indulged. Draco's hands find the smooth tile of the kitchen island, putting it between himself and Potter for good measure. And then, stupidly, he says, “I haven't got a ring on, for one.”

It's an absurd thing to focus on. He knows it, Potter knows it. Draco meets Potter's gaze bravely, lifting his chin a little higher to make sure he knows that his air of superiority has not been beaten into submission by these last few confusing weeks. 

“It's probably still downstairs,” Potter finally says, jerking one thumb over his shoulder towards a closed cellar door just kitty-corner from the door leading out into the back yard. “Your workspace is down there. You take the ring off when you’re doing… whatever it is you get up to down there.”

_ Whatever it is _ , indeed, Draco thinks furiously. Mother told him he was  _ brilliant _ at potions, that he was getting his  _ mastery _ , that he wanted to open a speciality shop,  _ of course _ he did. “Whatever I get up to,” Draco repeats, chewing on his own teeth.

“I’d know more if you let me down there,” Potter says, his tone suggesting an old argument he’s lost far too many times. 

Turning on his heel, Draco makes for the cellar door. He half expects Potter to stop him, to say something, but the only thing he hears from over his shoulder is the pan settling back onto the stovetop. 

Candles are lit along the walls of the stairwell. They’re clearly charmed not to burn down to the wick. As he descends the stairs, Draco can feel the warm, slightly suffocating blanket of a warming charm. The cellar opens up into a well-stocked potions lab-- three tables lined up in in the middle of the room, covered in equipment and piles of papers and books. There’s a wood-burning stove on one end, quiet and unlit. 

Draco carefully picks his way through the little lab, almost a makeshift dungeon. There’s scorch marks on one of the tables nearest the stairs, the wood of it seeming to have eaten up the brunt of a potion gone wrong. Beneath his boot, glass crunches. Draco’s stomach turns over, eyes flickering across the mess left behind. He knows himself enough to know that he wouldn’t leave his potions station in a state like this. 

_ Potions accident. _ That’s what everyone keeps saying. Draco traces his fingertips over the scorch marks on the tabletop. This is where it happened, then. He follows the edge of the table around the opposite side. At the end, there’s a little fabric pouch hung up with the pull-string on a nail. He pulls it open, teeth gritting noisily together. Inside is the ring, unharmed and nestled cozily at the bottom of the fabric.

Tipping the ring out onto his palm, Draco observes it like he might a particularly unpleasant potions ingredient. The metal is some sort of pinkish gold. It’s a simple band, no stones to speak of. Draco purses his lips, turning it over and over in his fingers. He doesn’t slip it on. Doesn’t try to see if it fits. 

The floorboards above the workshop creak noisily with Potter’s movements. Draco shoves the ring back into the bag, unhooks it from the nail, and shoves it into the pocket of his trousers. He ascends the stairs once more, feeling flushed and even more off-kilter than before. Potter is in the kitchen just as Draco had left him, though now he’s set two plates of french toast on the kitchen island, each soggy piece of bread dripping with syrup and watery strawberries. 

Draco eyes the food as he closes the cellar door behind him. The ring is heavy in his pocket. Potter slides onto one of the stools and watches him, elbows on the countertop. 

“Come eat,” Potter says softly. “They really are your favorite.”

They’re  _ not,  _ but Draco recognizes a peace offering. He doesn’t want to take it. The idea is intolerable. Even though the migraines are long gone, he can feel a tightness at his temples as he considers the possibility that his life really, genuinely, turned out like this. Like  _ this _ . A one bedroom flat with an open kitchen and a little sitting room and a study. Draco drops onto the stool opposite Potter, more due to his legs giving out than really wanting to sit and have a chat over subpar breakfast foods. 

“The Healer said we ought to surround you with familiar things,” Potter goes on. He stabs his fork into the edge of one of the slices of french toast, twisting the utensil until a chunk rips off. It’s barbaric. Draco doesn’t touch his own fork. 

“Familiar things,” Draco repeats. 

“Right,” Potter goes on, around the piece of bread in his cheek. “Like your favorite breakfast. And I was thinking we could go round to Ron and Hermione’s—“

“ _ Why _ ?” Draco balks. 

Potter looks at him with an unnerving amount of patience. “They’re our friends,” Potter says. “And they’re familiar.”

“ _ Your _ friends,” Draco corrects. “My friends are-- where are my friends? Pansy, Theodore--” Blaise Zabini seemed to be the only one who was still in his life enough to come and visit him in the hospital. What had happened to the people around him, the people who had made the same wrong choices that he had made? Did they have to live with the consequences?

“Pansy is in Berlin,” Potter says. His voice doesn’t change: the same steady patience permeates every word. “She works for the German branch of Witch Weekly. She’s been owling me non-stop. Theodore Nott is in Finland? I think? He travels a lot for work. Journalist. He’s been keeping up, but you two aren’t particularly close.”

Draco picks up his fork to have something to do with his hands, beginning to cut the french toast into small squares.  _ You two aren’t particularly close _ . That doesn’t feel right. He remembers, quite clearly, long afternoons in the Manor garden with Theodore. They would talk about things that felt normal. Draco remembers how easy it was to be, what at the time felt like, his authentic self. It wasn’t like being around Blaise, who Draco felt that he needed to continually impress, since their social standing was far from equal. Or Pansy, whose friendship was comprised of how much they could use one another.

“We can go round to Blaise’s, if you’d rather,” Potter says. “Or Gin’s.”

“Weasley?” Draco pulls a face. “Weren’t you two…?”

Potter laughs, the sound sharp and uncomfortable. He lifts one hand to the back of his neck, scrubbing his palm there. “Right, okay, this is weird.”

Draco frowns. “What’s weird?”

“This!” Potter says. He drops his fork and pushes his breakfast away. “It’s weird, sitting here and telling you things you already know. And it’s weird you’re asking about Ginny and I.”

Getting Potter to drop that eerie patience feels like a victory. Draco squares his shoulders and stabs a square of his carefully cut french toast, twirling it around in front of his face. “Apologies if this is just  _ so weird _ for you,” Draco drawls. “I’ll try to catch up to speed. Shall I take notes on who you are or aren’t being disgustingly intimate with these days?”

“ _ You! _ ” Potter practically howls, laughing now. 

Draco drops the fork. He can feel his face going red. The color climbs messily up his throat. He imagines that it must be blooming, blotchy, all the way up to his hairline. He shoves his stool back from the kitchen island and stands. He can hear Potter calling after him as he matches his way back through the apartment and to the bedroom. 

“Oh, come on— I’m sorry, love!”

Draco slams the bedroom door. And, just because he can, pulls his wand from his sleeve and casts a heavy locking charm.    
  


II.

Monday morning finds Draco alone in the house. 

The sounds of the waking neighborhood penetrate the walls, the murmur of voices, the stomping of feet on the pavement. The little wizarding district is tucked away from Muggle eyes and so for a moment, Draco finds it easy to relax.

His eyes are still tired, having slept very little. After his strop in the kitchen the morning previous, he and Potter had skittered around one another. Well— Draco had certainly skittered. Potter had tried his level best to get them to have a conversation that consisted of more than monosyllables. Draco refused. He intends to continue to refuse. Laying there in the bed, surrounded by an unfamiliar smell of the sheets, Draco watches the sun as it comes in through the curtains. 

Cautiously, Draco rouses himself and ventures out into the bedroom, dressed in the soft silk pajamas he’d found hung up in, ostensibly, his side of the closet. 

The couch in the sitting room is still piled with extra sheets and pillows where Potter had spent the night. There’s a plate of french toast under a stasis charm in the kitchen, along with a note that reads:  _ Gone to work. Love you. x Harry. _

Draco stares at the note with an unpleasant feeling hitching up the back of his spine.  _ Work.  _ He hadn’t thought to ask Mother what Potter filled his days with. In school, he’d wanted to be an Auror because  _ of course _ he did. Draco tries to imagine the Potter he knows now in the red Auror robes. The image hits wrong. Something about it itches the back of his mind. It isn’t correct but there is no memory there to call upon. It’s just a fact that he knows. It’s half past eight in the morning and Harry Potter isn’t an Auror. 

It’s almost a memory. Draco tries to latch onto it, to follow it to something new, but all he finds is a sharp pain behind his eye. Deciding to let it go, he turns his attention to the french toast on the counter top. He contemplates throwing it away in the bin just by the sink so that Potter would see it when he next walked into the kitchen. Instead, he waves off the stasis charm with a flick of his wand and tugs the plate towards him. There’s still warmth curling up from the egg-soaked bread. The syrup is just as runny, but the strawberries are fresh and set to the side this time. 

His stomach informs him quite soundly of his hunger and Draco gives in. 

The taste of the french toast is thick in his mouth. It’s decadent in a way that screams  _ excess _ . The syrup has a false, confectionary taste to it, making every corner of his mouth sticky and sweet. It certainly isn’t his favorite. It doesn’t even taste like it could be his favorite. And yet, Draco finds himself carefully cutting the bread into manageable squares and eating them. He mops up the runny syrup with an open half of a strawberry. It’s disgusting and he can’t possibly stop. 

The snarl of the Floo startles Draco into dropping his fork, as if caught in the act of something more heinous than eating breakfast. He drops the knife and pulls out his wand, putting the island counter between himself and the kitchen doorway. His stomach curls in on itself. He can feel his hand shaking no matter how hard he tries to steady the tip of his wand. The back of his neck breaks into a sweat and his whole body seizes at the sight of a curtain of red hair that swings around the doorway just moments before the rest of Ginevra Weasley emerges.

“There you are!” Weasley says, bright and loud. “What’ve you got your wand up for? It’s just me.”

_ Just me _ . Draco swallows thickly. It takes him a moment to lower his wand, though he doesn’t release it.

“What are you doing here?” Draco asks. This is his home, for all intents and purposes. Why would Potter not have the wards attuned to people coming and going in the Floo? The idea that just anyone could waltz in, at any time, for any reason, sends him nearly around the bend. 

“Harry’s been whinging non-stop about your whole… you know, your thing,” Weasley waves her hand vaguely in his direction. 

“My thing,” he repeats, deadpan.

“Well, come on, you’ve gotten some of your memories back, right? You’ve got to have.” Ginevra Weasley glides into the kitchen and drops to sit on one of the stools opposite. She takes a glance at the french toast before leaning her elbows on the countertop. 

“I,” Draco says. Stops. Doesn’t know what to say to that. Weasley is staring at him with expectant, brown eyes. He’d never thought about the color of Ginevra’s eyes before. Knowing that much detail feels far beyond the knowledge he ought to have as an antagonistic acquaintance. 

Ginevra’s face falls a little, her shoulders slumping. “No,” she says, expression twisting up a little. “Really? Not even a little?”

Draco doesn’t tell her about how Potter isn’t an auror, because it’s not quite a memory. It’s just a fact that he knows and there’s nothing attached to it. He shakes his head, instead.

Ginevra exhales, scrubbing her hands over her face. “Right, okay,” she says, sitting up a little straighter. “The Healer said familiar things, didn’t she?”

The trouble being, of course, that  _ nothing _ is familiar. Ginevra doesn’t seem to mind or care. She stands and claps her hands together. “So we’ll just go do familiar things. It’ll be fun. Go get dressed.”

Draco doesn’t move. “I would rather not,” he says, voice tight. He really wouldn’t rather. 

Ginevra comes around the kitchen island and grabs him by the arm. She’s smaller than him but he grip is atrociously strong. It’s far too easy for her to haul him halfway into the sitting room before he gets a good leverage to dig his heels into the carpet. “Come  _ on _ ,” she says. There’s nothing patient in her tone, nothing like Potter’s unwavering willingness to wait him out. With the Weasley girl it’s all action and gnashing teeth at the thought of putting it off. 

“Look, I get it. It’s all scary right now--”

“I’m not  _ scared _ !”

“--But you just have to  _ do it _ , by which I mean get your posh arse dressed and come faff about town with me.”

Draco twists his arm out of her grip. “If familiar things were going to work, you’d think they would by now! This is my home, apparently, is this not familiar enough?” Draco scrubs his hands through his hair, annoyed at the still unfamiliar tangle of the strands around his fingers. “I don’t want to do this! We’re not friends! I’m not married! I’m not even--”

What he isn’t gets swallowed in a frustrated noise torn from the back of his throat.

Draco turns to face Ginevra more fully, only to find that the determination in her face has not wavered even the slightest. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, as firmly as he can manage. “Not with you, not with anyone.”

In just under an hour, Draco is dressed and Ginevra Weasley is pulling him by the hand through the little Wizarding district that is his home. The streets are mostly clear of foot traffic now, but every once in a while they pass an old witch who smiles and waves her boney hand affectionately. The day is starting to warm, the edge of summer itching at the back of Draco’s neck. They’re almost on the other side of May, now. 

Ginevra pulls them both to a rattling stop in front of a small cafe, tucked awkwardly between two taller shops. Several outdoor tables spill out onto the walkway, a few people hovering around and taking their tea and coffee. Draco can smell the warm scent of freshly baked pastries. “We met here,” Ginevra says, bumping her shoulder into his own. 

“Here?” Draco repeats, brows knitting together. It doesn’t look like someplace he would ever in his life inhabit. Quaint, perhaps, but far below his standards in terms of an establishment. 

“Here,” Ginevra agrees. “You were sitting here--” She pulls him to one of the open outdoor tables, pushing his shoulders until he gives in and sits. “And you had a book and a pad of parchment and you were scribbling.” She steps back, holding her hands up and peering at him through the frame she makes with her fingers. 

“And I,” Ginevra says, hopping backwards onto the walkway. “And I was on my way to visit Harry. Merlin, what, four years ago? And he was fixing up the place you’re in now, back when he got it? And I was walking by and I saw you, I did a double take. I thought, no  _ way _ is that  _ Malfoy _ .” 

Draco watches, alarmed, as she pulls back the opposite chair and swings it around to sit on it backwards. Her arms cross over the back, her cheeks pink as she grins at him from over her folded wrists. “You remember, now, right?” Ginevra urges. “You’ve got to. I was here, and you were right there--”

He doesn’t. He doesn’t remember but he finds himself trying. Four years ago he sat here with his book and his pad of parchment and Ginevra Weasley came up to him and--

“--right there, and I said,  _ Malfoy! _ Really, I wanted to bother you, get a rise out of you,” Ginevra says, who has not stopped talking. “But you’d just seen my last game against the Appleby Arrows and I think you said something snarky about the pass I’d missed that game.”

Draco struggles to piece together flashes of his life in these brief snippets of information that Ginevra is able to give him. He’d watched a Harpies-Arrows game of his own volition, he came to a small cafe to read and take notes, he had deigned to have a conversation with a Weasley, of all people. She’s still staring at him with some sort of expectation growing on her face. As if telling him all of this will bring back the memories he can’t resurface. Shame and frustration blooms in equal measures under his ribs.

“What then?” Draco asks, throat tight and voice croaking. 

The enthusiasm in her voice softens a little when Ginevra says, “And we were best friends ever since.”

The confession nearly rocks him back in his seat. “Friends,” he says.

“Best of friends,” Ginevra repeats. “I brought you round to everything. You’re  _ funny _ and you give a good ribbing. Everyone thought I was stonking mad.”

“I would have, too,” Draco says, looking down at his hands. “If I were them.”

“You only think so because you can’t remember,” Ginevra insists. She turns her chair around and leans across the table. Her small hands cover his, the backs of her knuckles dotted with freckles. They climb all the way up her wrists and forearms, disappearing under the cuffs of her short-sleeve shirt. “We’re not kids anymore, okay? No on secretly hates you.”

_ I do _ , he thinks. Draco looks up at her and finds that the light coming from the mid-morning sun hits her just right. And it isn’t a memory, not really. But it’s quite like that moment in the kitchen. This is  _ Ginny _ and he  _ knows _ her. Everyone calls her  _ Gin _ and he knows her. Draco sucks in an uneven breath and tries to follow the thought, to trace it back to a concrete memory. Anything to make it real. But just like before, he’s left floundering, uncertain. These are just facts, floating useless in his mind, like the ability to recall a spell without remembering when he’d learned it. 

“Come on,” Ginny says, squeezing his hand. “This place has the best fruit tea.”

The cafe does, in fact, have fruit tea. Ginny orders for him and the tea is cold and iced and terribly sweet. It seems like everything in his life is confectionary and oversweet. He wonders what that says about him. Draco allows Ginny to take him on a quiet stroll through the neighborhood. She talks the whole time, pointing things out to him. The little shop at the corner. The park across from the neighborhood community center. Where they live seems so disconnected from the rest of London, not unlike Diagon Alley. 

“The schoolhouse is over there,” Ginny says after they’ve reached one end of the neighborhood. Draco can hear, just barely, the sound of Muggle London whispering through the ward spells. The rush of the Muggle vehicles, the chatter of foot traffic. The schoolhouse is a strangely constructed building, looking more like two different buildings cobbled together. Wood and stone meet in an off-kilter line down the middle. There’s a small fenced yard with a playground, a large tree over a little garden where sunflowers are just starting to bloom. 

“Do you want to go see Harry?” Ginny asks. 

Draco doesn’t connect the observation and the question right away. “He left a note saying he’d gone to work,” Draco points out. “And  _ no _ , I don’t.”

“Yeah, work,” Ginny says with a snorting laugh, gesturing widely towards the schoolhouse.

_ Work _ . Having not responded fast enough to the assertion, Draco finds himself caught up in Ginny’s unstoppable enthusiasm. She has him by the arm and they’re making their way up the end of the road towards the schoolhouse before he can say  _ no, absolutely not _ . There’s a sharpening tightness around his body as Ginny leads them through the warded gate, the magic around the schoolhouse letting them in (but just barely). 

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Draco says tightly. “In fact, I know it isn’t.” He doesn’t know how to explain the tense, uncomfortable atmosphere that blanketed his first night back home, or the dread that had hung around every corner of the long two weeks that he had spent with Mother in her flat. 

“Oh, we come round all the time,” Ginny says, misunderstanding. “The kids love it.”

_ Children _ . Alarms go off in Draco’s head and he wrenches his arm from Ginny’s grip. “I don’t want to see him,” Draco snaps. “And I’m tired of being told things about my life. You’re not helping, you’re just-- annoying me.”

The insult falls flat, especially when all Ginny does is roll her eyes. “You’re married,” she says, not stopping even when Draco visibly flinches and turns away. “You’re married to, like, a  _ really _ great bloke who puts up with you being insufferable day in and day out. Harry Floo’d me last night about how you holed up in the bedroom and won’t say more than five words at a time to him, which is kind of bullshit.”

Heat rises in Draco’s face. He’s vibrantly aware he’s being scolded publicly in the yard of the schoolhouse and he would rather the earth swallow him whole. He isn’t, as a rule, used to being scolded. 

“I,” he says. Ginny’s brows raise high into her uneven fringe. 

“I’m not married,” he finally gets out. “Someone else is. Someone else who’s been living my life but it’s  _ not me _ .”

“It is!” Ginny shouts. 

“I can’t stand you!” Draco snaps, throwing his hands up. “Or him! Or any of this!”

The door to the schoolhouse creaks open.  _ Please be anyone else _ , Draco thinks as he turns to look. His stomach swoops and drops miserably as Potter’s messy head leans out the doorway. He looks surprised, his face ruddy with stubble. Ginny turns too and at least has the decency to look like she’s been caught doing something she ought not to be. 

“Gin,” Potter says, one hand rubbing into his untidy hair. “ _ What _ are you doing?”

He speaks to Ginny, but Draco finds that Potter can’t quite keep his eyes off him, gaze flickering wildly between the two of them. Draco swallows thickly. The lump that has suddenly formed in his throat doesn’t move.

“You said familiar things!” Ginny half-shouts, throwing her hands up as if she’s done with this whole ordeal. Draco wishes that she would be. He wants nothing more than to slink back to the house and hole himself up in the bedroom and wait for the world to start making sense again. 

“I said I might bring him round for tea!” Potter snaps back, his voice a little quieter. He glances over his shoulder back into the building before fixing Ginny with a scowling look. “Can you please just take him home?”

Bristling, Draco says, “I can manage on my own.”

Potter seems to just suppress rolling his eyes. “I love having you visit,” he says, calmer than before. “But I can’t have you both shouting in front of the school. The kids can hear you and they’re very excitable when there’s shouting.”

“Sorry,” Ginny grits out. She pushes her hair back off her face with one hand and turns to grab Draco by the arm again. He’s getting quite tired of her pulling him around like this but the gesture feels so ingrained in him that he allows her to wheel him back around. 

“Alright, love?” Potter calls.

“Stop calling me that,” Draco snaps over his shoulder.

The silence hangs thick and heavy for a moment. Draco can feel Ginny’s furious stare boring into his cheek. He just wants to go home and crawl away, Perhaps draft a letter to Pansy or Theodore or Blaise and find anyone who can tell him if this is just some elaborate hoax the world is playing on him. 

“Get him home, Gin, please?” Potter says, voice soft. The door to the schoolhouse clicks shut. Ginny shakes him by the arm.

“See? You’re picking at a wound for no reason,” she hisses. 

_ Because it hurts _ , Draco thinks, viciously.  _ That’s why _ .

III.

The days following go like this: Draco awakes to an empty house and breakfast under a stasis charm. Potter leaves a note that he’s gone off to work. Draco explores the house three times over-- the books in the sitting room, the books in the bedroom, the books in the cellar. He finds his own notes, his Mastery work, and dives in. It gives him something to do with the long hours. Ginevra hasn’t come round again, ostensibly still upset with him over their spat on the schoolhouse lawn. That’s all fine with him, even if the house is almost regrettably silent in the interim. 

If he’s going for his Mastery, there must be some class he’s taking, some schooling his doing, some mentor he’s teaching under. Deciding that there is much about his life that is far more interesting than anything that has to do with Potter, Draco turns the house inside out looking for an address book of sorts. He finds  _ nothing _ , which drives him up a wall. He makes a note to himself to tuck his dignity aside and ask Potter to help him get in contact with his menor. Certainly, they’ll know of his… condition? His delicate state.

In the cellar, though, Draco does find what looks to be his thesis. It’s a manila folder absolutely stuffed to the brim with both handwritten notes and pages upon pages of theory, statistics, hypotheses and experiments painstakingly tapped out on a type-writer. Without the memories of post-Hogwarts education, Draco finds it nearly impossible to suss out what it is he had been writing about. Something about unstable potions and altering the unstable components without altering the end product. 

_ Specialty apothecary _ . But how he got from point A to point B is lost on him.

He tries, of course. The Wednesday after his walkabout with Ginevra ushers in the first of June. He sits so long in the cellar pouring over the pages of notes that his back aches. He finds a potions recipe torn from a book that he’s scribbled over, arrows and circles guiding the recipe in a different, but unaltered, direction. 

He almost considers giving the potion a whirl before his eyes land on the scorch marks left behind on the wooden table. His stomach churns and his muscles grow tight. Later, perhaps. In that moment, the cellar seems far too stifling under the warming charms, so Draco gathers all of the thesis notes and carries them back upstairs. 

Like most days, Potter returns from the schoolhouse around two in the afternoon. Draco has pushed aside the coffee table so that he can sprawl the notes and theories across the floor and look at them all as he stands in front of the couch. The sound of the Floo half-startles Draco from his reverie, his hand already going for his wand tucked up his sleeve. 

“Just me,” Potter says lightly, brushing soot of himself before stepping out of the hearth. His brows shoot up into his hairline, pulled back from his face in a messy knot at the back of his head. He’s stopped shaving. There’s a fine dusting of dark hair over his cheeks and chin. “What on  _ Earth _ are you doing?”

“I found this downstairs,” Draco says. He tucks his wand away and crosses his arms again, looking over the pages.

“Yeah, it's your thesis work,” Potter says, voice careful. He steps around the pages on the floor so that he can stand alongside Draco in front of the couch. “Of which I have been barred from even so much as looking at.”

“I’m sure you’re loving this, then,” Draco says snidely. “Free reign to get away with all the things I’d otherwise forbidden.”

“It’s a treat, yeah,” Potter deadpans. It would have been a joke, maybe, if the situation were funnier. “So why are we looking at it?”

“I’m very clever,” Draco says, tucking his hair behind his ears and bending down on his knees to point to a few of the pages nearest him. “Not just now, of course. Looking at these makes me feel like a first year.”

Potter makes a noise that sounds like agreement. Draco leans his elbows on his knees, eyes scanning the pages in front of him, as if he could glean any more information from looking at them from this particular angle. “Have you got the name of the mentor I’m working under?” He asks. 

“Erm,” Potter says. “Yeah, I might do. I’ve already owled her weeks ago when you went into hospital. She knows you’re not feeling well.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Draco says, annoyed. He pushes himself to stand and places his hands on his hips, surveying what seems to be his life’s greatest work. “You keep harping on familiar things. What’s more familiar than my thesis for my Mastery?”

He can feel Potter’s incredulous gaze on his face, so he turns bravely to meet it. But what he finds there is something like relief, the hard lines of Potter’s face softening. A smile even threatens to curl the edges of his lips. “Yeah,” he says, carefully eager. “Yeah, absolutely. I think I’ve got her address written down in the junk drawer in the kitchen.”

“Junk drawer,” Draco repeats. “In a kitchen.”

Potter flashes a grin that feels disarming. Draco’s stomach does something unpleasant, his skin itching underneath the tight fabric of his clothes. “You’ll get used to it again,” Potter assures, suggesting that his reaction to this particular part of their kitchen is not new. 

Draco follows Potter through the wide doorway to the kitchen, then watches as he pulls open a drawer next to the stove and begins rifling through it. There are plenty of scrap papers and other odds and ends that live in the drawer. Finally, Potter unearths what looks like something that used to be an address book, though the pages are half torn out now and the leather cover is bent and stained. “Here,” Potter says, proudly, eagerly, like he’s not keen to dissuade Draco from following this line of familiarity. 

“Her name is Camilla Hodgecombe,” Potter says, flipping open to a page. He hands the open address book to Draco. “I think she’d like to hear from you. Maybe she can even figure out what you were working on when this happened. The healers all say it’s just,” Potter pauses and waves both his hands vaguely in the air. “Your brain reverting back to the last traumatic event it had while it heals, but—“

“Yes, thank you,” Draco says sharply, taking the address book. Thinking too much on why he doesn’t remember his life feels too close to giving validity to Potter’s claims that they’re… what they are. That he is what he is. 

Potter’s hands drop, his shoulders slumping a little with the force of it. “Draco,” he says, voice going softer. “Come on.”

Draco keeps his gaze firmly on Camilla Hodgecombe’s address in front of him, fingers gripping the worn address book tightly.  _ Come on _ , Potter says in a voice so imploring.  _ You’re married to a really great bloke who puts up with you, _ Ginny had so meanly reminded him. He doesn’t have to have his memories to guess that Potter does not consider their time spent together as  _ putting up  _ with him. Draco drops to sit at the kitchen island, cheeks heating with color. 

“Fine,” Draco says, bravely. What he hopes is bravely. He sets the address book on the countertop and forces himself to look to Potter’s face. What he finds there is something quite like hopeful optimism. It makes his stomach churn. He squares his shoulders. 

“Yes?” Potter prompts. He sits across from him, elbows on the table. 

“I will entertain one thing about… us,” Draco says, forcing himself not to sneer on the word. “You may attempt to remind me how we… met.” That’s how Ginny had put it.  _ This is where we met _ , she had said, proud of the tiny cafe that served too sweet fruit teas. 

Potter’s face does something unfamiliar and complicated. “Okay,” he says carefully. 

_ Okay _ . Draco tries to tell himself that that’s what this is: okay. He finds his short nails digging anxiously into the wood of the countertop. He doesn’t know if he’s actually ready for this. Ginevra had felt far too much. But Potter is, admittedly, different. Everything insofar has been at Draco’s pace. The house is far from harmonious, but Potter keeps his cow-eyed distance. 

Potter seems to be gathering himself for a moment, his gaze dropping somewhere to the left as he draws in a breath. “Okay,” he repeats. He taps his fingers on the counter. The movement draws Draco’s gaze and there he finds the simple golden band, not as soft and pinkish as his own. His stomach twists up tight. The evidence of the things everyone has been telling him to be true stares him mockingly in the face. 

“Er, so it was about four years ago,” Potter begins, which tracks with the story that Ginevra had told him the other day. Draco forces his gaze back to Potter’s face, pressing his lips together in a firm line. Potter isn’t watching him, though. He’s still looking just off to the side, eyes flickering over nothing. “Gin had brought you round for trivia at the pub.”

“Trivia.” Draco repeats. He tries to imagine himself sat in a pub answering pointless questions, surrounded by the people who are supposed to hate him. 

“Yeah,” Potter says, shoulders shaking a little with inaudible laughter. “It was something we started doing on a whim, me and Hermione and Ron. And you and Ginny had been palling around for a few weeks before that, apparently. Except none of us knew! So here she comes into the pub, dragging you along.”

As Potter speaks, Draco can almost imagine it. He can imagine Ginny as she is now, though his concept of himself keeps changing— between his seventeen year old self and how he looks now, long hair in increasingly messier plaits. He wonders how Potter had looked— Weasley and Granger, too. Certainly long before any of them had settled into adulthood, long before Granger’s stomach had distended in pregnancy. If he concentrates hard enough he can feel the very edges of familiarity to the story in the form of a feeling: anticipation upon approaching the pub door, fondness for the sound of Ginny’s voice in the midst of the din of near-strangers. 

“Who won?” Draco asks, voice feeling raw. 

“Hermione,” Potter laughs. “The rest of us were too drunk.”

Whatever Draco had been expecting, it wasn’t this. He isn’t even sure how to categorize this in terms of who he and Potter are supposed to be to one another. It doesn’t sound like a meet-cute of any kind. It sounds like he went to trivia at a pub and got very drunk. “And then?” Draco prompts, hoping to unravel the mystery of it all. 

“And then?” Potter asks, laughing a little more now. “And then nothing. You were a very sore loser but you kept coming round to the pub anyway. Then you started bringing Blaise, too. Ginny is kind of the glue, you know, for all of us. She bridged those gaps first. Threw herself into it.”

If he thinks of Ginny, as she is now, he can imagine it to be true. 

“After she got signed with the Harpies and had to miss pub nights, you kept coming with Blaise anyway,” Potter says, voice soft in a way that Draco can’t quite place. “And then we just…” 

Potter sort of turns his hands over themselves, churning them pointlessly in the air. 

“Right,” Draco says, voice tight. He draws his shoulders back and tries to focus on anything other than the feeling creeping up the back of his neck. It’s not unlike the other times he’s had a not-quite-memory. As Potter talks, these things unfold themselves in his mind as universal truths that he has always known. He struggles to grasp for a specific memory to solidify what Potter has told him. But there’s nothing. The fleeting feeling leaves Draco feeling lost and frustrated. He digs his fingertips into the wood of the counter. 

“What else do you want to know?” Potter urges, carefully encouraging. 

_ Nothing _ , Draco almost says. He still can’t bring himself to give authenticity to what Potter thinks of their relationship. The words hang at the edges of his mind, the back of his tongue. If he says it, it makes it true and he isn’t ready for it to be true. He thinks of the pinkish-gold ring he’s tucked away in the desk drawer back in the bedroom. Instead, he says, “Ginevra mentioned you bought this house before we knew one another.”

Potter exhales slowly, hands fidgeting over themselves on the table top. “Right, yeah,” he agrees. “Erm, you know-- well, no, you don’t right now.” Potter takes a moment to gather himself. “So, my godfather left me a house? Except it was kind of… it was your family’s house.”

“Grimmauld Place,” Draco says calmly. He remembers Father’s fury when Black had died and left the property to Potter. It had been in Mother’s family for generations. He expects there are still familial heirlooms tied up in the townhouse. He tries to dredge up some anger at his mother’s family home being thrown away like that, but there’s nothing there. He hadn’t ever known the home, had only visited once as a child. 

“Right,” Potter says, relieved. “And it was kind of miserable. I tried living there for a year or so after the war, but it was a misery! I hated it. I tried to spruce it up but it just reminded me of…” Potter waves his hands again, letting his words trail off, as if Draco were supposed to know what it was that it reminded him of. 

“So I bought this place. It was practically falling apart when I bought it, but… you know, it was nice to put it back together again.” Potter exhales before continuing. “Erm, so after the pub nights everyone sort of started getting together here to help me put it together. Hermione, Ron, Gin… You brought Blaise round because Gin brought you round. We all just started… you know.” 

Draco finally looks away, peering down at the open address book on the counter. He drags his thumb against the edge of the paper with Hodgecombe’s name on it. “Well,” he says softly. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Yeah.” Potter’s words are nearly voiceless. “Thank you for letting me.”

Then: “Does it help at all? Can you… is any of it sounding familiar?”

Draco looks up, a little alarmed by the sound of Potter’s voice. It’s something Draco doesn’t think he’s ever heard from the man in all of the years he has known him-- seven and no more, he had been certain. But perhaps now, not so much. Potter’s face is tight around the edges, his lips pressing thin. He looks miserable.  _ A misery _ . The term itself tugs at the edges of his mind.

_ Don’t be a misery, Draco _ . 

“No,” Draco says softly, which isn’t quite true, but certainly isn’t false. “Nothing.”

Potter’s shoulders slump forward with his exhale, as if he had been holding all of his tender hope in his lungs. The sight does something unpleasant to Draco’s gut. “Soon, though,” Potter says softly, in a voice that sounds like he absolutely must believe it. “Talking to your mentor, though. That ought to do something. I think it’s a good idea.”

Relieved and perhaps somewhat vindicated, Draco nods. “I’ll walk down to the owlery.”

“Use the eagle owl,” Potter prompts. “She’s yours favorite.”

Draco thinks of the eagle owl that had come bringing letters to Mother’s little flat. These little things about his life falling strangely, unnervingly into place, even if they don’t seem quite right. He is now the type of person to pick a favorite owl out of the local owlery. He is the type of person to wear his hair long. The type of person to spend hours on a Potions Mastery. The type of person to marry. To live in a refurbished home that he helped build. 

Draco does not know who he is. But for a moment, he supposes, he might not mind himself.

  
  


IV.

Ginevra forgives him on Friday and lets him know as much by showing up at the house through the Floo at half nine in the morning. Draco’s barely out of the shower and dressed when the sound of the Floo snarls to life in the sitting room. Instinct wills him to draw his wand, though he just barely resists when he hears Ginny’s voice calling for him through the house. He doesn’t respond, but she comes down the hall to find him in the bedroom all the same as he buttons up the sleeves of his shirt and observes himself in the mirror in the corner. 

“You look fit,” Ginny says, hopping to sit on the edge of the bed. “Harry’s gone to work, then?”

“Mm,” Draco agrees.

“You’re really making him sleep out on the couch?” She sounds half annoyed and half amused, as if this news were something she could use to rib Potter with later. 

“I’m not making him do anything,” Draco says, pushing his hair back behind his ears. He hasn’t gotten the hang of plaiting it himself. “The issue of sleeping arrangements has not been brought up.”

Over his shoulder, in the mirror, Draco watches Ginny roll her eyes so hard her whole head rolls on her shoulders. “You’re insufferable in every single way,” she says. 

“I have a feeling that I’ve been told,” Draco says. Her turns to face her fully now, arms crossing lightly. “I’m going to meet with my potions mentor today. No, I don’t remember,” he says quickly, to dash away the look of excited hope on her face. “I sent her an owl yesterday about my memories and getting together for a meeting. Potter thinks it’s a good idea and so do I, which is one of the only things we haven’t been discordant in since I got here.”

Ginny’s shoulders slump a little, her expression falling. “Well, do you want me to go with you?” She asks.

“Aren’t you still mad at me?” Draco asks warily. 

“I’m always mad at you,” Ginny scoffs. “But it’s fine. I’ll go with you if you want me to.”

“I didn’t say I wanted you to.”

Ginny stands up from the bed, ignoring him for the most part as she comes around behind him. “Here, let me do your hair,” she suggests.

“What’s wrong with it?” Draco asks, reaching a hand to touch it. 

“You always wear it in these nice braids,” she explains. “Nice and put together.”

Draco allows Ginny to sit him on the edge of the bed while she grabs the brush off the dresser and climbs onto the mattress behind him. He feels as if he ought to be more reserved in allowing her touch him like this, with such familiarity. But for the most part, he can’t find it in him to be annoyed as she starts combing the brush through his hair, pulling it back off his face and over his shoulders. 

“I was thinking about cutting it,” Draco admits. “I don’t even know why I would have grown it out to begin with.”

Ginny scoffs from behind him. Her small fingers work quickly to begin sectioning his hair and threading the piece through one another. He watches them in the mirror against the wall-- himself, perched delicately on the edge of the bed with Ginevra Weasley hovering behind him, her expression tight and concentrated. 

“You asked Harry one night at the pub if he thought you would look fit with long hair,” she says absently. “And then you started growing it out.”

Finishing the braid, Ginny ties it into place with a silk ribbon at the bottom, smoothing it into place. Plaited, it reaches down between his shoulder blades. The weight of it is different than the complicated braid that Mother had done. It’s simple and straightforward, though Draco isn’t sure he quite likes how it exposes all the sharp lines of his face. 

“That can’t be right,” Draco mutters, standing up off the bed and turning to face Ginny, who is looking at him with a fondness that speaks to years of familiarity. For a moment, he deeply wishes he could remember her. He tries to bring up anything about her that he has not already been recently told, but all he does is give himself the beginning edges of a headache. 

“So do you want me to come with your or not?” Ginny asks. “I thought I should, because I’ve been wanting to ask you what we ought to do for your birthday.”

_ Birthday _ . For a moment, Draco is struck confused. Certainly his birthday is not yet for some time? He opens and closes his mouth, ruminating for the date. Friday the third? Then yes, certainly. His birthday was coming fast upon them and he hadn’t even noticed. To be fair to himself, he’d been rather distracted and in the last few years he can remember there had been nothing to celebrate when it came to his birthday. 

“My birthday,” Draco says dully. 

“Yeah, twenty-six, you old man,” Ginny says around a laugh. She jostles him by the arm. “We’ve been doing a get-together at the Burrow, but… I mean, if you’re not feeling up to a big celebration we can always do something smaller here.”

Twenty- _ six _ . Twenty-five had been enough of a shock. And now, a mere month later, he was expected to deal with the ever-forward marching on of time in the form of another year being added onto his body? Draco swallows and stumbles back to sit on the edge of the bed, rubbing his hands against his face. “I’m old,” he moans.

He feels the bed dip as Ginny climbs up there with him. Her body is warm and firm as she leans her shoulder against his own. He can smell her perfume, or perhaps her shampoo. It’s earthy and sharp. It reminds him of a Quidditch pitch at sunset. Draco drops his hands from his face, turning his head to look at Ginny, who is only smiling at him quite fondly.

“We’re all old,” she says, her voice a soft puff of breath against his cheek. He lets her take his hand in her own, small and freckled and sun-brown. 

Draco squeezes her hand, exhaling slowly. He doesn’t particularly  _ want _ to celebrate his birthday just now. It feels like just something else to add on top of everything else he’s struggling to figure out. The idea of getting everyone together in a room, all of them looking at him with hopeful, expectant faces, as if just one more familiar thing will give him his memories back… it’s far too much to bear. 

“I don’t quite feel up to celebrating my birthday this year,” Draco says, truthfully. “It doesn’t even feel like mine. None of this…”

Ginny squeezes his hand softly. “Let’s not be a misery today,” she says, that turn of phrase suddenly so familiar and close at the edges of his mind. As if he heard it said in the right tone of voice that he might be able to place the memory that goes with it. 

After leaving a note for Potter on the kitchen counter about where he was and with whom, at Ginevra’s stony-faced insistence, they squabble a bit about the best way to get to Hodgecombe’s office in Diagon Alley. In the end, they decided on walking from the public Floo and Draco found himself once more being rippled through the Floo network. Once spit out on the other side, Draco tries his best to brush off the soot that is now clinging to his nice robes. Ginevra comes stumbling out right after him, linking her arm through his own.

Diagon Alley is bustling now with the let-out of school. Draco and Ginny weave between families and roving gangs of mischievous teenagers. Ginny gets  _ noticed _ , which is alarming, especially when a trio of teenage girls stop them to chat and get an autograph. Ginny is charming through it all, laughing and grinning and asking them if they play, and what position? The girls end up being two chasers and a keeper for Hufflepuff. Ginny smiles wide for a picture with a magical camera, her arms slung around two of the girls’ shoulders.

Draco stands off to the side, unnoticed, unobserved. It gives him the opportunity to see Ginny in a way he had not yet. Entirely in her element. He watches as she waves away the girls and returns to him, cheeks pink, her smile secretly pleased even as she says, “What a nuisance!”

“You loved that,” Draco scoffs. “You loved every second of it. Look, you can’t stop grinning.”

“Oh, shut it,” Ginny says, laughing. “Like you don’t preen every time someone in the bakery asks if you’re  _ Mr. Potter’s husband _ .”

“I  _ don’t _ ,” Draco says, flushing, wishing she could just stop bringing that up. 

“Oh, maybe not now,” Ginny hums. “Don’t think I don’t know you inside and out, Malfoy.”

There’s a concept indeed. Flushed, frustrated, Draco says, “I suppose one of us has to.” To which Ginny laughs so loudly heads turn.

Hodgecombe’s office is just a few doors down from Slug and Jiggers, which seems only fitting. Draco’s certainty that this is a good idea seeps out of him as he pulls on the rope outside the door that rings a large bell from somewhere inside the little building. Ginny hovers over his shoulder, a bright red comfort out of the corner of his eye.

A tall, broad woman answers the door, with dark skin and white hair threaded into a mountain of braids piled up at the back of her head. Upon seeing him standing there, her expression shifts into something quite warm indeed, as if she were happy to see him. “Malfoy,” she says, in an accent that is undeniably Germanic. “It’s so good to see you. Your husband owled about the accident when it happened. I was so happy to get your message, though I’m sorry to hear you’ve not gotten your memories back.”

Draco swallows thickly. This woman is his mentor, the one who is supposed to be guiding him through his Mastery. He wants to know her. He wishes he could remember. If anyone, if anything, he wants to remember her and his thesis and his Mastery and all the hours of work he’s put in. “Yes,” he says, brushing off the comment about Potter. “I found my thesis work. I wanted to…” He finds himself churning one hand through the air. 

“Yes, of course,” Hodgecombe says, voice earnest. She steps aside to let them in.

“This is Ginevra,” Draco offers. 

“Oh, yes, I follow the Harpies closely,” Hodgecombe says, leading them through the front hall into a messy little office, piled with papers and books falling off the shelves. There’s a desk opposite a scruffy looking leather couch. “You’re having a good season.”

“Thanks,” Ginny says, grinning widely as she sits perched on the edge of the couch. 

Draco stays standing, feeling out of his element. He’s rather glad he had Ginny come with him, now. Hodgecombe’s dark eyes watch him with an intensity that he isn’t used to. People tend to look away from him, from what he can remember. He doesn’t know what to say. He had assumed that once he was standing in front of Hodgecombe he might come up with something more substantial than just blank staring.

“Your wanted to talk about your thesis,” Hodgecombe finally prompts. “Please, have a seat. We’ve been working together closely for some time. I can tell you anything you need to know.”

Ginny budges over for him on the sofa. Draco sits with his back stiff and straight, his hands wringing between his knees. “I’m supposed to be surrounding myself with familiar things to get my memory back,” Draco says. “And nothing seems to be working so far. I think I must have been working on something for my thesis when the accident occurred. From what I can tell, I’d been working on stabilizing unstable potions.”

Hodgecombe leans forward with her elbows on the desktop, her fingers laced together. She rests his chin on the bridge of her fingers. There’s something in her eyes, like she’s dissecting him. Draco feels perhaps a little too raw speaking so openly about his shortcomings. Ginny nudges her shoulder with her own, a firm comfort in this newly unfamiliar place. He’s even more glad for her to be here.

“What is it that you hope to know?” Hodgecombe asks. 

Draco twists his fingers together. “I’ve done it before, is all,” Draco says. “I learned it all before. I have my notes. I was hoping…” He hesitates, twisting his hands together in his lap. He can feel Ginny’s gaze on his face, can see a look of dawning incredulity out of the corner of his eye. “I was hoping I could catch back up. And keep working on it.”

There is a long, pregnant silence. Draco keeps his gaze on Hodgecombe, watching one thick brow tick up at the edge. He knows that it’s almost a ludicrous ask, that it’s almost unfathomable. But the knowledge is  _ there _ , somewhere! He  _ knows _ it, even if he can’t access it right just this moment. It must be inside of him and if only he had someone to help him get back at it… Draco would be alright if the only thing he could remember is his thesis. His Mastery, his life’s work!

Hodgecombe is looking increasingly as if she’s waiting for him to tell her that he’s just teasing.

“I’m afraid that without the memory of all the work you’ve been doing, you’ll be a bit lost,” Hodgecombe says, finally, dropping her hands. “I couldn’t work with you on your Mastery while you’re still remembering. I’m sorry, Draco. This accident happened with all of your knowledge, with all of your skills! With the gaps in your knowledge, it would be irresponsible for me to work with you on this.”

Impotence surges up against his sternum. He just feels hopeless.

“Well,” Draco says. His throat feels tight. “Of course, I ought to have known.”

Ginny’s hand is on his knee. “It’ll come back, love!” She says softly. “You’ll be back in the cellar before the week is out.”

Before the week is out. Every turn-over of a new week, someone inevitably says:  _ before the week is out _ . The never-ending optimism is making him feel queasy. 

They stay in Hodgecombe’s office for another quarter of an hour or so, Draco finding it increasingly difficult to have a normal conversation that doesn’t involve him throwing himself against the table and begging her to take him on again, even without his memories. Eventually, he and Ginny make their way back out into Diagon Alley. The mood feels sobered. Even Ginny has nothing much to say as they start the walk back towards the public Floos. Draco’s mind is preoccupied with a hundred different things, burning frustration among them. 

“I’m sorry, love,” Ginny says once they return to the house, the morning turning over into afternoon.

“What are we sorry for?” Potter’s voice coming from around the doorway to the kitchen nearly startles Draco out of his skin. Fridays saw a half day at the schoolhouse and Draco had all but forgotten that Potter had mentioned that he would be home early because of it. Draco turns to face him, lips pressed into a thin line as he does his best to look neutral and not like his hopes for jogging his own memory had been soundly dashed.

“Nothing,” Draco says, waving off the question. “The visit with Camilla Hodgecombe was less productive than originally hoped, is all.”

“Sorry, love,” Potter says and it makes Draco’s skin do something strange. Goose-flesh rises up along his arms, along the back of his neck. 

Ginny brings him out of it with her hand on his arm, pulling him along into the kitchen. He passes through the doorway within enough space of Potter that he can smell his shampoo. The scent feels suddenly so familiar that it makes him do a double-take, peering over his shoulder at Potter with an expression that he can’t quite control. 

The kitchen is messy with lunch half-made, pasta and chicken in various states of almost-finished. Ginny sits on one end of the kitchen island and Draco joins her, opting to put her between any possibility of having Potter sit closer to him than necessary. 

“So now we can talk about what to do for your birthday, right?” Ginny goads.

“I told you I would rather not,” Draco reiterates. He has a strange feeling run up the back of his spine. These are not unfamiliar conversations.

Lunch is pleasant enough. Ginny doesn’t stay, begging off, which leaves himself and Potter alone in a quiet kitchen. They eat in relative silence, which gives Draco the time to decompress after the day out on the town with Ginny. And, furthermore, to bow his dignity enough to prepare himself to tell Potter about Hodgecombe’s answer to his lofty aspiration.

“So the meeting,” Potter says, clearing the plates and setting them in the sink. Draco rests his elbows on the table, pressing his chin to one palm. 

“She can do nothing for me,” Draco says. “I had hoped that if I were to dive right back into my thesis work, if I could catch up on what I’d already learned, I might be able to jog some memory or another. Hodgecombe’s suggested this was irresponsible and all but scolded me out of her office.” 

It's hyperbole, but he’s in the mood for someone to feel sorry for him. 

“She’s just a bit right, though, isn’t she?” Potter hedges. He’s put tea on, standing with his back leaning against the sink. 

“ _ Maybe _ ,” Draco grouses. “She  _ might _ have a point. But what else am I to do? Just sit around and hope that something might bring my memories back?”

“You could let me tell you things,” Potter points out, his voice tight. Frustration, perhaps. “You could let our friends see you. Blaise, even! You were friends in school.”

“His social station was above mine,” Draco says, waving one hand. “Our friendship was one of convenience.”

“ _ Not now _ ,” Potter insists. “You’re getting on with Ginny! Aren’t you? You’re alright with her popping by.”

Draco chews on the inside of his cheek. He doesn’t want to think about the mechanics of his brain that allow him to have an amicable relationship with Ginevra Weasley. He does not want to think that his subconscious remembers her where he, himself, cannot. It would make the implications of everything else far too strong. He would have to imagine himself and Potter in some other relationship beyond reluctant housemates. 

“It’s my own choice,” Draco says, brows knitting together. “No one else’s. I’ve decided to get on with Ginevra. I want to do it.”

The frustrated lines that color the edges of Potter’s face start to soften. The hard set of his shoulders loosens and he drops his arms from the tight cross over his torso. For the first time, Draco feels less like he is something that Potter must have unending patience for, and like he’s being listened to,  _ really _ listened to. Everyone insofar has done nothing but tell him what he ought to do, what he needs to do, what he should be doing-- what he can and cannot do! 

“Alright,” Potter says. His voice is infinitely soft. Something jumps at the back of Draco’s mind. He’s heard these words before, in this voice. Soft, in the shell of his ear, pressed against his wingbone.  _ Alright _ . 

“Alright,” Draco agrees. 

And it is. For now, anyway.  _ Alright _ . 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr @dracoofficial

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @dracoofficial


End file.
